Brain-Dead Morons

I'm not sure if I picked up the habit from Tina Fey in "30 Rock" or the character Schmidt in "New Girl," but now I really enjoy summing up the problem with kids these days by shaking my head and saying, "ugh, youths."

I find myself saying that all the time as a high school teacher.

As much as I like to pretend I wasn't exactly like them though, I know it's a lie.  I was often irresponsible, forgetful, disrespectful, stubborn, and sometimes just downright stupid.  See, youths can't help but be youths.  Their brains are re-developing.

When we're babies we make all these connections in our brains, then we prune them down to the useful connections.  Once puberty hits our brains decide to go for round two.  So teenagers are re-developing their thought processes, their understanding, and their schema for the world around them.  They can't help but be - as my mentor during student teaching so lovingly put it - brain-dead morons.

Watching my little brain-dead morons struggle with what seems like the simplest of problems for me has made me realize something: I don't want my children to go to college right after high school.

When I went to college I wasted the first two years staying up late, ditching class, and caring more about social aspects than the incredible learning I could have been doing.  It wasn't until I got engaged to The Man that I realized real life was coming fast and I needed to shape up.  When The Man went to college for the first time he slacked off too; we didn't realize the importance of what we were doing, and we didn't realize the great opportunity we had in our hands.

And it wasn't just us.  So many college freshmen and sophomores just do not get it.  Yes, there are a select few that work hard and really do succeed, but they are few and far between in my experience.  Our teenage brains weren't ready for it.

In my child psychology classes we talked a lot about the importance of factoring development into academic success.  Many young boys become frustrated in kindergarten because male brains develop in a different order than female brains, and for 5-year-old males fine motor skills (writing letters, drawing, cutting with scissors) are generally quite difficult.  Many teachers advise parents of young boys to hold them back from kindergarten a year if they're struggling; that way when they come back the next year they are more developmentally ready and they can enjoy the activities more.

Why can't we do this with our teenagers and college?

I'm not saying I'm going to let my child lounge about the house for a year and pamper them until they're developmentally ready, but I can see some merit in international journeys, backpacking trips, or even just working for a year or so, saving up for college.

When students are developmentally ready for college, they work so much harder, and they see much more success.  It's been interesting watching The Man return to college after a several-year hiatus.  Instead of returning to his B, C-student standing, he started off his first semester back with straight A's and hasn't dropped below an A in the last two years.  It's not just The Man though; I knew many adults who came back to college (or were coming for the first time) in their 20's and 30's, and all of them worked harder and succeeded more than any of the freshman coming straight from academia.  They were developmentally ready.

Now maybe I'm way off, and maybe I'll change my mind in twenty-or-so years when I'm actually crossing this bridge, but it's something to think on.