Adolescence is foreign country (and fleeting!)

 

The NPR article "Dispatches from Quarantine: How Young People are Documenting History" recounts Historian Alexandra Zapruder's project to document adolescents' experience of the pandemic by asking young people to send her their diaries.  The project, called Dispatches from Quarantine, launched in April 2020, and those questions were explored and answered through all sorts of mediums — like the stringing of words, the strokes of a paintbrush or to the strums of a ukulele.

As a teacher (and as a fan of all sorts of these types of projects!) I love this idea for a couple reasons.  First, as the article talks about, we need to pay attention to young people -- to see them and hear them -- because of how the pandemic has affected them.  As the article puts it:

It's been more than a year since the COVID-19 pandemic completely upended our lives. For young people especially, it reprieved them of fully experiencing the world during a crucial time of growth and development.  Parents all over the world are beaming with all sorts of questions to get a grasp on the pandemic's toll, such as: How has the pandemic been affecting our children? Has remote learning slowed their education? Has reduced socializing hurt their development?

But I also like the project because it affords a special insight in adolescence, which I'm coming increasing to understand, is a temporary and magical foreign land.  It's an altered state of being with special risks -- and special temporary abilities.  Just because we move through the time of adolescence into a different state (young adulthood, adulthood) doesn't mean that it's better; that the vision is clearer.  (Like, maybe what adolescents lack in wisdom, they make up for in spontaneity... or, their natural spontaneity gets in the way of acting with wisdom and forethought.)  It seems to me a time of easy access to feelings and openness and self-inquiry (which might also account for the tendency of kids to follow strict clothing uniform trends OR to break them).  

My favorite line of the article emphasizes both the foreign and fleeting the time of adolescence (the condition of adolescence) is.  Adolescence (like the past?) is a foreign country.

Zapruder's interest behind documenting adolescence is simple: it's fleeting.

"It goes so fast and once it's over, it's lost forever, we cannot recapture that point of view as anybody who knows anybody who lives with a teenager knows how foreign in a way that perspective can be," she adds.