‘Were they thinking at all?’

I was walking past the Red Top the other morning at about 08.40, a blustery and icy wind whipping noisy orange leaves into a tumble at my feet, when I nearly fell over a car. It was very large and metallic anthracite. That’s last year’s cool so it was not that that attracted my attention. What did was the fact it was neatly parked on a ‘no parking’ sign under a ‘no parking’ sign explaining that there was ‘no parking’ in English and German and giving an excellent reason why. Within normal human visibility from this point was the car park with several spaces obviously not full of car.

I thought to myself… no, we won’t go there… I’ll think something I might regret. But it did get me thinking about why some of our students sometimes do something that defies all logic and reason to adults. Sometimes they seem…how shall I say?... non conformist. Deliberately they seem at that moment to ignore established social convention, common sense, everything we told them, safety, hygiene and the laws of physics and do something breathtakingly ununderstandable. And the answer to my apparently inappropriate (I have learned this and so have you) question: ‘But what were you thinking of?’ often said with just a tincture of exasperation, is: ‘I don’t know!’ And they don’t! Really! Because they weren’t. Thinking, that is.

I went to a superb workshop, twice it was so good, given by a venerable lady professor, at the ECIS Conference in Nice last year, on the adolescent brain and she came to the same conclusion after years of tests and studies and trials and observations including a wonderful and hilarious anecdote involving her own son, her husband who was a police officer and a gigantic marihuana plant. The adolescent brain at certain moments in its development, for explicable chemical reasons, can motivate its owner to do something who has no explanation for the motivation thereof and therefore for the subsequent action. It’s not that the memory was conveniently in its short term mode; Jemima was simply not at that time thinking. (Two days ago I had to see some students who had made an unwise decision. 15 minutes before I needed them in my office, I happened to see them and reminded them. 14 minutes later they had forgotten and in my office I waited in vain. When they remembered they were genuinely mortified, jumping up and down and beating their sides with frustration and self directed anger that memory had malfunctioned so inexplicably. After just a small explosion I remembered the above and as a result had a much more constructive discussion as I decided not to get distracted from our main topic by the annoyance of this adolescent aberration of memory.)

So, on the positive side you could say it does produce a wonderful moment of togetherness as you and your teenager both are bemused at the same time by the same thing. Childhood is a different world; it is smaller, more magical, more flexible, more controllable by the kids and a very often lot more fun than ours as we get older. But we cannot get in there. We cannot share it. We cannot speak the language anymore. The codes and cues and prompts are forgotten. If we try we embarrass them. We just secure it, I think. Adolescence is like this but there are no rules nor signposts there, not even for its inhabitants.And my point? So they do want help and guidance as much as we teachers and we parents do. Again, that throws us onto the same side about something very important to all participants. It takes away the conflict.