A Fascinating Read
In between answering calls at work today, I read a fantastic article in the January 2013 issue of New York magazine. The article was written by Jennifer Senior and is titled "Why You Truly Never Leave High School". Here's a sample:
To most human beings, the significance of the adolescent years is pretty intuitive. Writers from Shakespeare to Salinger have done their most iconic work about them; and Hollywood, certainly, has long understood the operatic potential of proms, first dates, and the malfeasance of the cafeteria goon squad. "I feel like most of the stuff I draw on, even today, is based on stuff that happened back then," says Paul Feig, the creator of Freaks and Geeks, which had about ten glorious minutes on NBC's 1999-2000 lineup before the network canceled it. "Inside, I still feel like I'm 15 to 18 years old, and I feel like I still cope with losing control of the world around me in the same ways." (By being funny, mainly.)
Yet there's one class of professionals who seem, rather oddly, to have underrated the significance of those years, and if just happens to be the group that studies how we change over the course of our lives: developmental neuroscientists and psychologists. "I cannot emphasize enough the amount of skewing there is," says Pat Levitt, the scientific director for the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, "in terms of the number of studies that focus on the early years as opposed to adolescence. For years, we had almost a religious belief that all systems developed in the same way, which meant that what happened from zero to 3 really mattered, but whatever happened thereafter was merely tweaking."
The purpose of the article is to discuss how what happens in high school follows us more than what happens in our years as toddlers because it's during our adolescence that our brains go into overdrive as far as development, not to mention how it's hard to focus on individuality and being your own person in high school, where you're basically in a bubble of the same age groups. It's hard to find something beyond your peers with which you can identify. There's other great reading material (studies and books) noted in the article that are worth looking into.
To most human beings, the significance of the adolescent years is pretty intuitive. Writers from Shakespeare to Salinger have done their most iconic work about them; and Hollywood, certainly, has long understood the operatic potential of proms, first dates, and the malfeasance of the cafeteria goon squad. "I feel like most of the stuff I draw on, even today, is based on stuff that happened back then," says Paul Feig, the creator of Freaks and Geeks, which had about ten glorious minutes on NBC's 1999-2000 lineup before the network canceled it. "Inside, I still feel like I'm 15 to 18 years old, and I feel like I still cope with losing control of the world around me in the same ways." (By being funny, mainly.)
Yet there's one class of professionals who seem, rather oddly, to have underrated the significance of those years, and if just happens to be the group that studies how we change over the course of our lives: developmental neuroscientists and psychologists. "I cannot emphasize enough the amount of skewing there is," says Pat Levitt, the scientific director for the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, "in terms of the number of studies that focus on the early years as opposed to adolescence. For years, we had almost a religious belief that all systems developed in the same way, which meant that what happened from zero to 3 really mattered, but whatever happened thereafter was merely tweaking."
The purpose of the article is to discuss how what happens in high school follows us more than what happens in our years as toddlers because it's during our adolescence that our brains go into overdrive as far as development, not to mention how it's hard to focus on individuality and being your own person in high school, where you're basically in a bubble of the same age groups. It's hard to find something beyond your peers with which you can identify. There's other great reading material (studies and books) noted in the article that are worth looking into.