The New York Times just published an insightful piece on how “teenagers are different”.

Not to cast aspersions on this fine journalistic institution, but “No Duh!”

And then, in the field of adolescent brain biology, the Times just reported that a gent named Dr. Steinberg recently won the $1 million Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize for his work in this field of study. He even gets to go to Switzerland to collect the cash and eat a few tasty meals along the way, I assume.

A million clams for that? Heck, if he gets this kind of cash for his insights, how much are the following 3 insights worth for me:

1) Dr. Steinberg says teenagers are not crazy, they are different.

I say teenagers are crazy — but their craziness actually represents a form of sanity and it’s really the adults in this world who are bonkers. To wit, I offer you Glenn Beck. Is there a teen loonier than that?

2) Dr. Steinberg says that “neuroscientific research is showing that over the course of adolescence and into the 20s, there is continued maturation of the brain.”

I say hogwash. If anything, most 20-25 year olds have their heads more up their butts that most kids between the ages of 13-19. I mean have you waited in line at a Starbucks lately? Those aren’t teens taking 11 minutes per customer to pour a cup of joe and bag a cranberry muffin… they are peeps years out of high school. Once again, case proven!!

3) Dr. Steinberg says that, “We’ve found that a certain part of the brain is activated by the presence of peers in adolescents, but not in adults.”

Oh really. Well, maybe some more adults should take a clue. I mean look at how this person is dressed… you’d never see a teen buckle to this level of “I don’t care-ness.” (And thanks heavens, too!)

All in all, I think my own astute findings deserve at least 25 grand. And considering it really only took me fifteen minutes to make these deductions, I gotta say, what in the world is this illustrious doctor doing with all his time being that he requires years to draw his conclusions whereas I pretty much bang mine out right off the top of my head?

Wait, I know… he’s GAMING! And I bet I know 100 teens that could kick his butt at Call of Duty 4 as well. Wonder what his “research” says about that!!

Doctor Schmoctor!!

In a “what’s old is new again” type of teaching thrust, some schools are going old school and dividing kids by gender in the classroom. Here’s an article from the L.A. Times about an academy in our city that seems to be happy with the results of separating kids in this manner.

Me, I am not really sure how I feel about this.

Now first, let me say that I was able to teach an all-girls English class and and all-boys English class two years ago in an attempt to see if breaking kids into this type gender-based class alignment actually offered any benefits. (NOTE: we had a teacher that had been doing it for almost 30 years — a woman I greatly respected; an educator who swore by it — and she was retiring so I decided to take over the idea for just two of my sections.)

For me, it worked out really well… for the girls. That class blazed. Really, the girls were just on fire that year. It was amazing! I mean I never had so many kids do homework… so consistently.

And do the reading. WOW! We blazed through so many books it was remarkable. We did projects, had debates, almost NEVER had classroom management problems… the girls just tore it up.

The boys… not so much.

Now I am of the opinion that, in general, today’s girls are very often kicking the butt of today’s boys in school. I see it with my own eyes every day. More boys drop out. More girls go to college. More girls are at the top of the class whereby more boys seem to be barely scraping by. Of course, these are generalizations but if you’ll allow me to speak in generalizations, I’d say it’s pretty clear that the efforts of the women’s rights movement, feminism, birth control, call it what you want… have not only brought a healthier degree of equity to the role of gender in education, but the scales have actually been tipped in favor of the young ladies.

Girls today are leading the charge in our schools and personally, I have no problem with this. (BTW, this phenomenon is also part of the subplot of my book The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez. Having a proactive, strong female protagonist who valued her own schooling and was determined not to become “dependent” on a man plays a solid role in the novel and hits, I believe, a very true note with today’s teenage, girl readers.)

Yet, I didn’t teach all boys/girls classes again the next year. And why? I think it’s because I discovered that the boys needed the girls… much more so than the girls needed the boys. I mean we are definitely having “issues” with boys in our schools today — especially in Title 1 schools like mine — so for all the benefits I found the girls were getting, well… a part of it felt like they were coming at the expense of the boys. The boys found a pecking order. There were leaders, there were followers and there were wallflowers… and for sure there was a bit of the Lord of the Flies aspect to their interactions. But most troubling was that boys, once they found their pecking order, didn’t seem to feel any drive to break out of their roles once they had settled into them. It was as if once they all became socialized to a certain means of operating, they stayed within those confines no matter what I did to shake it up.

The girls perpetually pushed one another… and they supported one another (for the most part) as well. But the boys… well, like I said. The class was kind of like a kite that never really took off and flew the way I had hoped and the reason why – at least to me it seemed, the reason why was, in part, due to an absence of girls in the class.

Maybe it makes sense to divide kids up by gender? Maybe there is a bunch more I need to learn about teaching in a single-sex class? Either way, it’ll be interesting to see if this type of gender-based classroom assignment will catch on more in the future, that’s for sure.

How come almost so many things a teacher can say at the front of the room during instruction can be twisted by freshman boys into some sort of sexual reference?

For example, I just used the phrase “he stiffened up” in a class of freshman (referring to the emotion of fear in a piece of lit we were reading)… and BAM, out came the giggles.

Har-Har… he ‘stiffened’ up. 10 kids laughed.

Of course, as soon as the words left my lips, I knew I was in trouble… and I truly wish I would have chosen a different means of describing how this person’s spine became more erect from fear.

I said FROM FEAR!

D’Oh! here we go again.

This is pretty much the reason why I just let the guffaws pass and keep on teaching when I toss up a few unintentional “sex ref” softballs that my freshman boys can wallop easily out of the park… because the chances of me trying to reframe the conversation and clarify what I meant will probably only add more fuel to their young fire and cause even more tangential links to the human penis.

You gotta admit, freshman boys can be pretty ingenious. I mean I have seen them link the most asexual things to human anatomy in a way that boggles the mind. And when they do, nowadays, I just play ostrich: I pretend I didn’t hear what they said, bury my head under the well-worn carpet and keep right on teaching… cause to stop risks disaster.

Then again, in the spirit of full disclosure, another part of me knows that if we were to wind back the clock about a hundred years to when I was a freshman in high school, well… for anyone who doubts the rule of karma exists, I’d say I could probably offer some anecdotal proof.

Maybe this aspect of my career is just a case of the stiff chickens coming home to roost?