Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
Sleep patterns change during adolescence, but unless you can alter the school day, students need to figure out ways to deal with their predilection for going to bed and waking up late. Jason at FrugalDad has a nice compilation of statistics about why we need sleep. Particularly useful is the section on different ways to get more sleep. (I also like the fact that he cites his sources at the bottom.)
Source: ᔥhttp://frugaldad.com
Gum is an effective booster of mental performance, conferring all sorts of benefits without any side effects. … chewing gum is often a better test aid than caffeine. [However] gum chewers only showed an increase in performance during the first 20 minutes of testing.
— Lehrer, 2011: The Cognitive Benefits of Chewing Gum in Wired.
Jonah Lehrer has a fascinating article on, how chewing gum improves mental performance“. It does not seem to matter what type of gum, just as long as you’re chewing.
The benefits (briefly and probably overly simplified) of chewing gum:
On the other hand, while chewing might be good for most types of memory, one study found that chewing, and other rhythmic tasks reduces short-term recall of long lists (Kozlov et al., 2011).
Lehrer cites a 2004 review of the research on gum and memory, which describes chewing gum as, “a functional food with function but no food” (Scholey, 2004).
The takehome message for using gum while taking tests:
When taking a test, save the gum for the hardest part, or for those questions when you feel your focus flagging. The gum will help you concentrate, but the help won’t last long.
— Lehrer, 2011: The Cognitive Benefits of Chewing Gum in Wired.
This research shows that profanity is not harmless. Children exposed to profanity in the media think that such language is ‘normal,’ which may reduce their inhibitions about using profanity themselves. And children who use profanity are more likely to aggress against others.
–Brad Bushman (2011) in a Brigham Young University Press Release.
Exposure to profanity in videogames and on TV appears to affect how teens view and use profanity, and makes them more aggressive. These are the key results of a paper by Sarah Coyne (Coyne et al., 2011). The full article is available online, but is summarized here.
While the first part, at least, of this result might seem obvious — that seeing profanity desensitizes, familiarizes, and leads to increased use — it’s nice to have some scientific corroboration.
The more disturbing result, perhaps, is the link between profanity and aggression. It’s a moderate effect, but the link appears similar to the connection between war games and aggression.
Profanity is kind of like a stepping stone. You don’t go to a movie, hear a bad word, and then go shoot somebody. But when youth both hear and then try profanity out for themselves it can start a downward slide toward more aggressive behavior.
— Sarah Coyne (2011) in a Brigham Young University Press Release.
[A]nger … triggers a less systematic and structured approach to the creativity task, and leads to initially higher levels of creativity. … [However] creative performance should decline over time more for angry than for sad people.
— Bass et al (2011): Creative production by angry people peaks early on, decreases over time, and is relatively unstructured
Here are a couple of studies on the interaction between negative emotions and creativity whose implications require some very careful consideration. We want to encourage creativity, but how and at what cost to the student?
Social rejection was associated with greater artistic creativity
— Akinola and Mendes (2011): The Dark Side of Creativity: Biological Vulnerability and Negative Emotions Lead to Greater Artistic Creativity
Anger, it appears, leads to more unstructured thinking, thinking that is more flexible and able to make new connections among different categories of information. However, anger’s creativity boost does not last that long – strong emotions take a toll – and people soon revert back to a more normal baseline.
These results come from an initial study, and there are a lot of unanswered questions. In particular, I wonder just how much anger is useful for this beneficial outcome. I find it hard to believe that too much anger is terrible useful. And, I’m also curious about the negative consequences in terms of group interactions. Brett Ford points out that some studies have found that anger is useful in negotiation, but only when that negotiation is confrontational. Another study found that angry leaders were better at motivating groups of less agreeable people. Conversely, more agreeable people responded better to less angry leaders.
In a scenario study, participants with lower levels of agreeableness responded more favorably to an angry leader, whereas participants with higher levels of agreeableness responded more favorably to a neutral leader.
— Kleef et al. (2010): On Angry Leaders and Agreeable Followers
How Leaders’ Emotions and Followers’ Personalities Shape Motivation and Team Performance
It seems that the ability to project anger may be a useful skill to have in one’s toolbox, given the variety of people we will have to deal with in life.
Modupe Akinola and Wendy Berry Mendes point out that highly creative people tend to introversion, emotional sensitivity and, at the extreme, depression and other mood disorders. Unfortunately:
[M]ood disorders are 8 to 10 times more prevalent in writers and artists than in the general population (Jamison, 1993).
— Akinola and Mendes (2011): The Dark Side of Creativity
On top of the general mood, strong, more transient, activating moods, like anger and happiness, also affect a person’s ability to be creative. Both positive and negative activating moods (the hedonic tone) enhance creativity, but in different ways:
Curiously enough, although creativity is associated with a baseline of sadness and depression, these two are not among the activating moods that can spur the creativity of the moment.
The implications of these studies are complex. I certainly need to think about them a lot more, but it would seem reasonable, or perhaps responsible, to encourage students to carefully monitor their moods and to help them better understand themselves and their behavior. Ultimately, it is probably better if we are able to control how we use our emotions, rather than the other way around.
The pre-frontal lobe, which is responsible for formal thinking, is the part of the brain that can put the brakes on impulsive emotional behavior. It can also, to a degree, modulate how emotions are expressed. As adolescents’ pre-frontal cortex develop, they should be better able to control and use their emotions to their benefit. But to do so, they need to be aware of their emotions and the power of their emotions, which would suggest training in emotional awareness and control.
I’m not aware of any programs or curricula that delve all the way into how to use your emotions proactively, but I’d like to see something that particularly discusses how to use the different activating moods.
When it comes to approaches to solving problems, boys tend to think that talking isn’t particularly useful, while girls, who do prefer to talk things out, run the risk of talking themselves into depression.
When girls talk, they spend so much time dwelling on problems that:
it probably makes them feel sad and more hopeless about the problems because those problems are in the forefront of their minds [and]…makes them feel more worried about the problems, including about their consequences.
…In general, talking about problems and getting social support is linked with being healthy. [But it can be] too much of a good thing.
— Amanda Rose (2007) from the University of Missouri, Columbia, in Girls Who Complain About Their Problems At Greater Risk Of Developing Anxiety And Depression
Rose recommends that they, “engage in other activities, like sports, which can help them take their minds off their problems, especially problems that they can’t control.”
Puberty starts somewhere in the age range of 8 to 13 years for girls and 9 to 14 years for boys. However, in Norway, in 1850, girls hit puberty at around seventeen. Over the next 100 years that age decreased to thirteen and a half, where it has stabilized, but a similar trend has been seen in pretty much all the industrialized countries, including the U.S.. No one knows quite why, but there are a number of theories, including:
It seems clear that this trend has something to do with improving living conditions. Rapidly developing countries like China are experiencing the same trend in earlier puberty right now. Wealthier areas in developing countries have girls starting puberty at the same age as girls in “privileged” countries, while their compatriots in the poorer areas do not. Also, Overweight kids tend to start puberty earlier.
However, explaining the earlier puberty is difficult because no one knows for sure what exactly triggers puberty to begin with. The genetic switch that tells the hypothalamus to start the process probably involves multiple genes that are affected in complicated ways by how and where a person grows up (when the environment affects how genes are expressed it’s called epigenetics; NOVA has a nice little program that explains how epigenetics results in differences in identical twins.).
Increased stress might be another explanation. Girls in Bosnia and Croatia started having puberty later and later during the war in the 1990’s. However, it appears that other types of stress, such as from insecure relationships with parents and adoption, can do the opposite and trigger even earlier puberty (note: really early puberty in kids as young as 9 is called precocious puberty and is a growing problem).
Certain artificial chemicals that disrupt the endocrine system, which is responsible for hormone production, have also come under suspicion, but their effects have been hard to prove.
Whatever the reason, the earlier onset of puberty has lead to an increase in the length of adolescence (which tends to start with puberty and ends somewhere in the mid-twenties). It’s hard to say though, if all the extra time is beneficial, since it does give the developing brain extra time to adjust to a more complex society, or if it just makes for a longer period of trying times.
A recent study making the news today, warns about the risks of energy drinks. 30-50% of adolescents and young adults drink them, they have lots of caffeine and other additives, and they do not have a whole lot of benefits.
Energy drinks have no therapeutic benefit, and many ingredients are understudied and not regulated. The known and unknown pharmacology of agents included in such drinks, combined with reports of toxicity, raises concern for potentially serious adverse effects in association with energy-drink use.
–Sara Seifert et al., 2011: Health Effects of Energy Drinks on Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults
Applying the precautionary principle might be in order.
Misha Angrist, who is having his entire genome published online, argues that extricating genetic diseases from the population can have unintended consequences:
“… the genome is a dynamic thing, and a balancing act. Sickle cell trait has persisted because carrying it protects one from getting malaria. Who’s to say that carrying one copy of a cystic fibrosis mutation doesn’t similarly protect us against cholera or various diarrheal illnesses? If we eliminate those mutations from the population, are we opening the door to a future of intestinal problems?
–Misha Angrist in an interview with Maud Newton, A Conversation with Misha Angrist, Publisher of His Genome
(via: The Daily Dish)