Physical and Psychosocial development of the adolescent student

Physical Changes in adolescence

This week I would like to start by mentioning some interesting things that I remember from my golden years (adolescence). For many people being an adolescence means having problems such as behavior issues, acne, big physical changes, emotional problems, relationships, first love of our lives, break ups, etc. I was not an exception; thus, my adolescent stage was very tough since I actually experienced all those problems mentioned above. When I was 12 years old I used to try to get along with the popular ones since I wanted to be popular; also, I used to beat up on my classmates; moreover, I had acne issues and experienced a lot of physical changes.

Although adolescence can be a very hard stage for most human beings, now I understand why adolescents go through all these situations. Based on the article "The Self, Identity, Emotion, and Personality". I was able to find out the scientific reasons for such stage which is full of ups and downs. According to Susan Harter, "The contemporaty perspective on the self emphasizes the construction of multiple self-representations across different relational context". that is, basically the changing view that adolescents are going through since they are looking for a specific role in a specific group, that is why adolescents behave in different ways throughout these period such as tryng to be part of new popular trends, acting different in order to get a gir/boy's attention, having some sort of rebellion with parents and teachers, listening new music, having new haircuts. Moreover, Erik Erikson researched the Identity versus Identity Confusion and he explained that " the identity versus identity confusion occurs during adolescence. at this time, individuals are faced with deciding who they are, what they are all about, and where they are going in life". As we can see, Erikson was trying to say that teenagers are trying to decide what they are and what they are going to be; so, this hughe dilema makes them have some sort of confusion affecting them in all senses.

As a teacher I would like to help my adolescent students by helping them with this important decition which is deciding what they are and where they are going to. First, I think that in order to be able to help adolescent students they have to trust in you as a teacher in order to become their friend; then,  I would try to make them see how important is to take good decitions during this period since a bad decition may affect them the rest of their life, third, make them see how important school is since it is the key for succes. I think that these three aspects are important and as teenagers students have to take them into account at the time of making decitions.