Adolescent

• Adolescence is a stage of human development that coincides with puberty, a biological development occurring at the average age of 11 for girls and 12 for boys.
• As the teen is susceptible to peer pressure, the negative influence of social media, drug use and addiction, early romantic sexual adventurism, the teacher and the school can conduct interventions to assist the youths with focus on risky and inappropriate behavior while promoting positive development among adolescents.
• The teacher plays a most important role in promoting positive changes for the adolescent.
• Factors contributing to early puberty and delayed puberty include heredity, diet, exercise and socio-environmental influence.
• Early and late maturation in adolescence accompany the cognitive and socio-emotional development of adolescents.
• The teacher must be an understanding teacher who can provide guidance and support to adolescent learners in their high school years.
• Adolescence is a period of transition in terms of physical, cognitive and socio-emotional changes.
• The period of adolescence begins with the biological changes of puberty.
• The specific ages for the period of adolescence vary from person to person, but early adolescence characterized by puberty may come at the ages of 11 and 12, middle adolescence may meet identity issues within the ages of 14 and 16, and late adolescence marks the transition into adulthood at ages 17 and 20.
• Throughout life, growth hormones condition gradual increases in body size and weight.
• Hormone flooding during adolescence causes an acceleration known as growth spurts.
• Growth spurts include a change in body dimensions (leg length, shoulder width, trunk length), and a spurt in height is ascribed to trunk growth rather than leg growth.
• In girls, the growth spurts generally begin at age 10 reaching its peak at age 13 and a half, while slow continual growth occurs for several more years.
• John Holland has identified basic personality factors that match with attitude and work preferences: Realistic, Investigative, Conventional, Enterprising, and Artistic.
• Teens enjoy learning through the use of group dynamics including role play, discussion, debate, and drama.
• These adolescent attitudes and abilities demonstrate self-reliance, social responsibility, mature work orientation, personal responsibility, and positive attitude to work.
• The teen manifests emotions which need to be regulated for success in school as well as for his her own emotional well-being.
• Adolescents may also show capability for multitasking, later on becoming professionals such as doctors who are at the same time business entrepreneurs.
• During adolescence the teen develops social cognition in the context of family structure, the school, the community, and media.
• The unique patterns of emotions are: event that is strong or important, physiological changes in heart pulse rate, brain activity, hormone levels and body temperature, readiness for action often described as “fight or flight”, and dependence of the emotion on how the stimulus is appraised or interpreted.
• Early on adolescents may show abilities for gainful work, later on becoming self-supporting in college, by entering the service sector as fast-food employees, sales clerks, office messengers, and utility personnel.
• Parents and teachers must be able to recognize the cognitive development paths among adolescents and create situations that will foster higher thinking skills through activities at home, allowing more independence, activities in school that allow participation, and developing reading skills through magazine articles, Internet blogs.
• In the classroom, the teacher has the mandate for creating a positive learning environment, while facilitating the students’ sound moral judgment.
• The Department of Labor and Employment reports that there is a mismatch between academic preparation and job skills thus worsening the gap between employable school graduates and potential jobs or employment.
• Senior High School Grades 11 and 12 were designed to provide attention to occupational skills that are absent even among college graduates.
• Strict imposition of the use of English in the campus has been the strategy by premiere schools to develop argumentative students who later on transform into leaders in politics, business and other top professional fields.
• In boys, growth spurts begin at age 12 reaching a peak at age 14 and declining at age 15 and a half, while slow continual growth continues on for several more years.
• Among girls, 98% of adult height is generally reached at age 16, while boys do so at age 17.
• Growth in height is conditioned by stages in bone maturation.
• The muscles also grow in terms of size and strength during adolescence.
• The series of hormonal changes accompanying puberty is complex.
• Hormones are powerful and highly specialized chemical substances that interact with bodily cells.
• In a Meyer study, the end of a romantic relationship can affect both boys and girls, but girls are twice as likely to experience depression, while boys are three to four times more likely to commit suicide.
• Underachievement may become more pronounced when high school class work becomes more demanding.
• Another brain development is the process of correlated temporal and parietal areas (technically known as myelination) which covers the brain systems whose executive functions relate to attention, verbal fluency, language and planning.
• The adolescent begins to acquire spatial awareness and formulate abstract or general ideas involving numbers, order, and cause-effect.
• Adolescents need sufficient amounts of vitamins B12, calcium, zinc, iron, riboflavin, and Vitamin D.
• To meet the physical development of adolescent children, parents need to be aware of manifestations of behavioral patterns that require closer communication, guidance and support.
• Adolescence is a time for rapid cognitive development and there is a decrease in egocentric thoughts, while the individual’s thinking takes more of an abstract form.
• Changes in thinking patterns during adolescence are marked by the acquisition of new cognitive skills due to the brain’s increasing in weight and refining synaptic connections (technically known as corpus collosum) which join and coordinate the two hemispheres of the brain.