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Monday, April 22, 2013

Adolescent Stalking...I mean sightings

So I'm in an Adolescent Development class because apparently it's important for me to know about this stuff as a high school teacher.  Whatever, I totally went through puberty gracefully.

Anyway, we had to do these journals where we wrote about our adolescent sightings and how their behavior reflected what we had learned in class.  Some people went out of their way to go places like high school basketball games, or Panda Express to creep on teenagers, but I felt really weird doing that...and I was too lazy.  So I just sifted through the recesses of my brain to find ANY adolescent encounters I had in the last few months.  And this is what I came up with.  No changes were made.

  • 3/09/13 Later evening: I was disco skating in Orem and there were a lot of high school students there. I saw many cliques, but I think they were all part of a crowd. It was pretty obvious who belonged to which clique though because they were literally wearing the same disco clothing (or their interpretation of disco clothing) and looked exactly the same. They also grouped themselves pretty obviously by taking photos to post on any number of social networking sites. My guess is Facebook or Instagram.
  • 3/22/13 Evening: I went to the movies and there were a bunch of younger adolescents there together. A lot of the girls were taller than the boys because they had started their physical development before the boys their same age. Or maybe they just like younger boys; I won’t judge.
  • 3/28/13 sometime during the day: I was talking to my younger sister who’s about to graduate high school. Lily recently got a job at a restaurant called Sushi on a Roll, and although she has had her licence for a while, she really feels the difference in her social status, particularly in the economic area. Even though Lily’s fairly certain she got the job because she’s half Japanese, she takes her position seriously and is willing to roll sushi when she has absolutely no credentials to be doing so (in a sushi restaurant of all places).
  • 4/10/13 Evening: I went to the BYU Synthesis jazz concert and it was super awesome and the crowd fully enjoyed themselves...except for the middle school boy sitting behind me. While everyone was cheering for an encore, the boy was complaining and asking when it would end. I don’t know if the boy has a musical background like most of the audience, because he definitely wasn’t geeking out as hard as me. But I really think the biggest reason for his disinterest was his age. He wasn’t as cognitively developed and I don’t think he realized the extreme talent of good old Wycliffe Gordon, and simply just heard jazz music instead.
  • 4/13/13 Afternoon: While I was longboarding down the Provo Canyon I saw a lot of adolescents doing the same, but in a much more hazardous manner. I’m assuming the development of their limbic system was ahead of their prefrontal cortex, because they were definitely thrill seeking. All I could think is how stupid they were being, and secretly wanted to put helmets and knee pads on them.
  • 4/18/13 Morning: Today I’m pretty sure there were more high school students on campus than actual BYU students. I think there was some kind of language fair going on, but mostly it just meant that there were high schoolers swarming in packs EVERYWHERE. I’m still amazed with how much noise they can produce, but I guess they were just excited or something. I was studying (cramming) for my Japanese oral exam on the third floor of the JFSB, and somehow the high schoolers found their way up there, too. They were looking for a particular room, and it was interesting to see how some of them would ask me if I knew where they were supposed to go, and others would continue wandering around instead of using an actual college student as a resource. The older students seem to have developed socially because they weren’t afraid to ask me for directions (that I couldn’t give).
  • 4/18/13 Afternoon: Today I was running on the Provo River Parkway trail on the west side of Provo. I was running with one of my professors who has been helping me train for a half marathon. She is pretty thin and cute, so it can be easy to mistake her for a college student, especially since she was running with me. We ran past a couple adolescent boys who were skateboarding and wouldn’t even look at us. I’m pretty sure they recognized that she was a grown adult, and acted very distant because they probably haven’t developed many intimate relationships with adults yet. On the other hand, a couple other boys on bikes whistled as they went by. If they would have known my teacher was actually thirty­-three, and not in her twenties like me, I don’t think they would have done that. They also had each other, and I’ve found that men and boys rarely call out when they don’t have their friends around them. Whether it’s a boy or a man, it’s still obnoxious.
And that's what I turned in for my assignment.  I hope I get an A.