Yesterday I got my most recent university assignment back for my paper in Young Adult Fiction. I shan't tell you what my mark was, suffice it to say I passed. I am now at work on the next assignment due alarmingly soon. However I thought in view of recent debates in social media about what is suitable literature for this age group I should post up one of my answers in this last assignment. So here you go, two different perspectives from the same person on what an adolescent/young adult is
Aim: to construct a working definition of adolescence
1. Compile your own working
definition of adolescence. Write no less than half a page, more if you feel you
need to
2. Treat the term as
something unfamiliar, as a strange object you have never met before. How would you
describe the experience of adolescence to someone from another world, or a
place where the teenager did not exist? Write no less than one page.
1. Adolescence – a time of
significant physical, intellectual and emotional change and growth, culminating
in the commencement of adulthood, transforming individuals from complete
dependence and helplessness as infants, to the independence and physical,
emotional and social maturity of adulthood.
During adolescence individuals become
sexually mature in a process driven by hormones, becoming physically able to
produce children of their own. Hormones also drive the appearance, growth and
maturation of gender specific features such as facial and pubic hair, breasts
and adam’s apples. Adolescents
experience new physical growth, with hips and/or shoulders broadening, and the
reaching of their adult height, vocal tenor and shoe size. Brains too are
maturing and thought processes developing and refining, with adolescents liable
to impulsive and risky behaviours based on their ill-founded confidence in
their own youth.
Adolescents are hungry for information
during this developmental phase, looking for an understanding of their world
and their place in it, testing physical, societal and moral boundaries and
exploring their own wants, needs and desires. Adolescence is also a time of
emotional instability and especially in view of the rate of sexual maturation
and refining of emotional intelligence, teens often struggle to control their
feelings and find the right emotion for the moment.
----------
2.
All humans start off very
small, born live and usually screaming and fairly grubby looking.
Beginner humans are helpless and completely
dependent on others to have all their needs met. However they don’t stay this way. They expand
and become less helpless learning how to feed, clothe and get themselves
around. They can now talk, and like to hang out with others of a similar size
at shops that sell lollies and hot chips. They decorate their bedroom floors
with their clothes and spend most time at home avoiding tasks set by their parents. After ten or twelve human years their basic training in being a human
is finished and they begin a new phase called adolescence. This is a dangerous
time, not for them but for any other people in their vicinity. Adolescents are
mostly confused: about who they are, how they feel, the opposite sex and why is
there hair and body lumps where there never used to be hair or body lumps
before. They often appear to grow overnight with small weak boys going to bed
for the night and emerging the next morning taller than their parents. This
quick growth often results in significant levels of awkwardness and/or
clumsiness.
Adolescence is the time when humans grow
their sex organs. Now they can make new humans of their own and much time is
spent selecting and attracting a mate. It appears, especially for some humans,
that many mates must be tested before the right one is found. Although
adolescent humans can make a new baby most have not left their own nests and
made one of their own. Even so prospective mates are sometimes test driven and
new humans are made.
Although many adolescents have bigger better
working brains than beginner humans or children they often forget this and do
silly things, often with the assistance of chemical substances. Adolescents
have little interest in any other phase of human development and tend to keep
themselves separate from older and younger humans. This way it is easier to
ignore the requests and demands of others. However they are still disappointed
if older humans cannot read their minds, and refuse to believe that older
humans might know anything about them or their feelings. This is often stated as
“no you don’t know how I feel and you can’t possibly understand what I am going
through.” Speaking these words is a time honoured tradition uttered by
countless generations of adolescents. Conversations with an adolescent are
usually conducted via arguments or grunts. Adolescents also smell different,
usually of pits, tic tacs or week old socks. Adolescents talk, cry and scream a
lot, often accompanied by music. They often like to live, and socialise in dark
places. When adolescents finally finish this phase, having completed their
growth in all dimensions, they become adults and seem to block out all memories of the
adolescent phase so they in their turn can misunderstand the next group of
adolescents.
