Fiction for the Fourth

This weekend my roommate went back to Ohio to spend time with her family, and I had our 1840 house to myself. The rainy weather and the dark, log cabin interior to our house made reading the activity of choice.

For school, I'm reading Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence (reviewed along with other adolescent books here). It has raised a million questions about what it was like for my mother to raise three of us; by this book's calculation, adolescence begins at 10 and ends around 25, so she was dealing with three adolescents for a while, and is still dealing with one!




The book argues compellingly that the best thing we can do for teens is help them develop their impulse control. Self-regulation is key to success (not to mention safety) during adolescence and later in life. What's more, self-regulation can be taught, while intelligence cannot, really.


 

He also argues that the phenomenon which everyone will recognise of adolescence lasting longer, with twenty-somethings living at home and people delaying marriage and parenthood, can be a boon to society if managed well. He says that adolescence is a period of brain plasticity, during which we remain hyper impressionable. This can be good - the more different and challenging things we are exposed to as adolescents, the more open-minded we will be. Better to test and stretch the brain as much in its plasticity than to let it settle into an unchanging mass as early as twenty.




This made me feel like I want to keep traveling and teaching, two things which support brain plasticity in my experience. Challenge, surprise, dynamism, and constantly a flow of new people.




In school reading related to my other school, Richmond High School, I was enthralled by one title in particular that Meg, my mentor teacher, recommended I read from the tenth grade reading list. The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls is a memoir from a girl who grew up in a family that was constantly on the move in the western US. It is a recounting that emphasises, above all, that children can get used to anything, and will consider whatever they have as normal if their parents do (granted that they don't have easy access to peers to compare themselves to). It is a marvellous story which also brings home the importance of loving parents, when all kinds of other resources - money, jobs, extended family, schools - are not present.


In short fiction this weekend, I read "The Fugitive" by T. Coraghessan Boyle, a story of a young Mexican man in California, dealing with illness, and listened to this wonderful short story twice (when I listen to things, I really need to listen to them twice): Ben Lerner reading John Berger's "Woven, Sir." The discussions which follow, which always irk Monica for their high brow nature, are to me like mini lessons in contemporary literature, so I like them, even if they are stuffy. 

I also enjoyed sitting by the rainy window and having coffee in a new (well, old), and finally properly sized coffee cup which I found at a thrift store last week.