Drive

P.E. was not my favorite class in high school. I didn’t dread it, but P.E. often served as a reminder that had I lived in a more brutal environment — medieval Denmark, for example--I would most likely not have made it past freshmen year.

I was, and still am, a bit clumsy. Despite this defect, however, one bright spot did exist in the Physical Education curriculum, and that was badminton.

Badminton was made for people like me because there is very little chance of being seriously injured. Doubles badminton, especially, was great, because it offered me the opportunity to ride on the fourth-hour coattails of the best badminton player in the entire school: “Jump” Anderson.

Now, for the three of you who actually went to school with me, you know that there was no “Jump.” “Jump” is merely a pseudonym for an old classmate who most likely has no interest being mentioned in a newspaper, but was absolutely designed for badminton. Speedy, lithe, aggressive and smart, this guy could react to even the most intense shuttlecock barrage and send the birdie back across the net exactly where the defenders weren’t.

Our strategy was simple: he played front; I played back. This was kind of an offshoot of our baseball strategy, the one in which he pitched while right field was mine, which, in turn, was closely related to our basketball strategy, where he ran the offense and I ran the tap for the team water bottles. Basically, my job was to serve on occasion and stay out of his way. Once we settled into our rolls, we burned through the fourth hour tournament bracket like an ACC dynasty.

Now, many of you are probably thinking, “What. Are. You talking about? March Madness is over, baseball is in full swing, and badminton is not even a real sport.”

All true statements, but I write to you today about badminton because it relates to a much more serious topic: pretend teenage driving.

According to a recent article from NPR, Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University, conducted an experiment in which he put a number of adolescents into a fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine while they played a virtual driving game. Despite what we may assume, the adolescents actually “drove” as safely as a group of adult subjects — when they drove by themselves. However, when additional adolescents were added to the mix, “this doubles the number of chances adolescents take,” Steinberg found, without making any difference in the performance of the adult drivers.

Now, this is not really new information. Graduated driving ages and teenage insurance rates have reflected this conventional wisdom for quite some time. Many teenagers tend to do silly things in front of their peers that they otherwise would not.

But why?

Another scientist mentioned in the same article, B.J. Casey from Weill Cornell Medical College, explains that in adolescents, the prefrontal cortex, which plays a crucial role in decision-making, is still very much a work in progress. According to Casey, this part of the brain acts as the Dr. Spock to the limbic system’s Captain Kirk. The limbic system, “the emotional center of the brain that's always on the lookout for threats and rewards,” needs the prefrontal cortex to make sense of the environment. However, because this portion of the brain is still developing in adolescents, the reward-seeking impetus behind the limbic system often overrides the cold, hard logic of reasonable behavior.

This is why many teenagers willfully engage in behavior that they are fully aware is counterproductive, such as smoking or jumping off houses. They do these things for the visceral thrill, yes, but they also do it, quite literally, because they are in front of their friends. According to the article, “The limbic system doesn't just flag rewards... A 12-year-old gets a kind of high simply by being around other adolescents.”

The crucial takeaway from this study is that peers can influence one another’s behavior by affecting each other’s brain chemistry. Thus, adolescents should be wary of who they hang out with. Parents should be especially wary of who hangs out with their kids.

This was quite true for me in high school, because by hanging out with “Jump” in fourth-hour P.E., I made it all the way to the championship match of our esteemed double-elimination tournament. Things went well for awhile. The score stayed tight, but in the end, our opponents sent one too many birdies flying to the back court. When the game was on the line, I swung and missed. We lost.

Which just goes to show, our peers absolutely do influence our lives, for better or for worse, as children, as adolescents, and even as adults. In the end, though, in badminton, as in life, no one can take our swings for us.  

Repost

(The following is a column/blog post that I wrote about a year ago.  In light of local dialogue, it seems worth repeating.)

The seven of you who read my columns on a regular basis may have noticed that I very rarely write about anything that is locally relevant.  My columns often focus on semi-amusing anecdotes about my children, or they will offer the reader fairly vague commentary on a global issue too remote to really make anyone upset.  Recent events, however, have inspired me to discuss an issue that is extremely local, quite relevant, and, most importantly, almost certain to make some of you angry.  You are welcome.

Effingham High School, where I do my best to teach English on a daily basis, has recently come under scrutiny concerning its discipline policy.  Many parents are upset by an environment that they feel is too aggressive.  Some parents, in fact, have chosen to discuss their concern directly and publically to the school board, and for that they should be commended.  Most people, when something bothers them, simply whine about it and more often than not take out these frustrations on innocent bystanders.  Letting your voice be heard at a public forum in a reasonable manner is an exercise sorely lacking in modern American discourse, where it has become much simpler these days to merely hook a few expletives to a semi-coherent, generally misspelled “status update,” or “tweet,” and then send it on its merry way while hiding safely behind a computer screen.

One argument being used to suggest that EHS has a stricter-than-necessary discipline policy is the amount of suspensions being assigned.  Although the number has actually declined in recent years, on the surface the value might still seem too high in relation to the total number of students.  However, like most statistics, this number is a bit malleable, and, like all statistics, it needs to be taken in context. 

For the sake of argument, let us assume a school has a total of 55 suspensions in one academic year.  For a school the size of EHS, which has a fluctuating enrollment of approximately 830 students, that number might be a bit alarming.  After all, taken at face value, one might assume that EHS suspends 15% of its student body.

That is not the case, however.  This number represents the total number of suspensions overall. As a colleague mentioned to me earlier this week, if one were to take three or so students out of that equation, the number of suspensions would drop dramatically.  In other words, the number of students choosing to disregard the rules so often that the administration believes it is finally necessary to remove them from that school is much lower than 55.  Since gardening season is upon us, we’ll use this analogy.  Just because 55 carrots were eaten out of your garden in a year doesn’t mean you had 55 rabbits in your garden; it most likely means you have a few very hungry rabbits.

 This number also does not take into account that EHS, like most modern high schools, uses a progressive discipline policy. This means that only under extreme circumstances would a student be removed from their education for an isolated rule violation.  Suspensions are almost always the end consequence following a series of poor decisions. 

Another argument being forwarded is that the modern high school seems much stricter and more regimented than what we remember. The argument suggests that the modern student has more rules to follow than their counterpart from decades past.  This is mostly true.   Students today do have more rules to follow.  Today, people in general have more rules to follow.  Six months ago I could legally answer my cell phone while driving and learn that I needed to pick up some milk on the way home.  Today, thank God, answering such a call is against the law. 

Society has changed.  For good or ill, we put a much greater emphasis on safety than what we used to, and we seem much more willing to use litigation to make our schools safer.  Schools have always been a reflection of the society of which they serve, regardless of that society.  For example, I have to be “buzzed” into my daughter’s preschool just to pick her up, regardless of how fancy my tie looks that day. 

In closing, we need to ask ourselves:  what is the purpose of schools anyway?  If schools exist to prepare students to succeed in and contribute to an increasingly complicated society, then we do them a tremendous disservice by disregarding inappropriate behavior.  We live in a universe that functions amidst immutable laws.  For every action there will be a reaction.  That’s not public policy; that’s just physics.   That’s not a discipline code; that’s just life.

Teaching our young people to take responsibility for their actions isn’t going to hurt their self-esteem. Teaching our young people to take responsibility for their actions is perhaps the most important lesson we can ever teach, and it’s a lesson much easier learned before graduation.