Meeting and Dealing with Changes in the Brain of a Teenager

In this course we are going to be working with teenagers. I have worked with teenager at church and it is a little bit complicated. Also I have some friends that are teenager and I have the opportunity to see their behavior. In my time working and seeing teenagers I could notice that they are really unwise. They tend to do things without thinking in the consequences. They have a lot of question about life. They feel curiosity about forbidden thing and they want to know the answers. They look for experience some situation in their lives. Teenagers are energetic, but in most of the cases they do not use that quality in an appropriate way. They tend to stress themselves with little things such as: being fashionable or maybe love problems or other little things. In this phase most teenagers do not have their own identity. Their likes are similar to their friends’. They want to be like someone famous maybe a singer or an actor or a soccer player. Teenagers are against the rules maybe that is natural in them, they do not like to follow instructions from their parents or from the authority. They feel like they are invincible and that they can take the control of their lives, but they lack of experience and their attitudes and decisions could be wrong. They as us are going to make mistakes, and we as teacher should know how to react while working with teenagers.

I found some interesting aspects about the changes on teenagers’ brain. There are some things that are “natural” in teenagers. At the beginning I thought that this behaviors were attitudes adopted for them, but reading some information I found out that their brains are going through a stage. Adolescents act by their emotions. When they have to make a decision their feelings and emotions have an important impact in what they choose. The article I read said that there exist an emotional reactivity. According to the article adolescent are looking for new experiences and in most of the cases these kind of experiments have and unpleasant ending.

As a teacher my expectations for working with teenagers are that they could apply all of the qualities that they have in order to learn, understand and practice English. They are smart and if they focus their attention in something the results would amazing. I hope to understand better teenagers. We as teachers need to know different strategies for exploiting the abilities that our students have. We need to look for subtle ways for teach them something. Also we need to know how to catch their attention. I hope to find a way how make them do something not pushing them, but make them want to do it. We should encourage them for learning English in nice and attractive ways.