By Sid Parham, PhD, Chair of the Leadership Team at FFS

This week’s cover story in New York Magazine proclaims that “High School Is a Sadistic Institution.”   It is a survey of recent social and psychological research into the life of adolescents.  It is a very good summary and I recommend the entire article.  Here I’d like to focus on one study that included rats and humans. This team of researches (Casey , Lee, Pattwell and others) discovered that ”adolescents—both mice and humans—were far less capable of dialing back their fear response than children or adults.”

These experimenters shocked mice after playing a neutral tone and they subjected the humans to an unpleasant noise paired with a neutral color.  Very quickly both mice and people learned that the stimulus was the precursor to unpleasantness.  Each showed measureable physical reaction.   Over the next few days the experimenters decoupled the stimulus and the painful response.  Very quickly both children and adults unlearned the physical response.  Adolescents retained the fear response after more trials than it took to reteach either children or adults.  In fact, they retested the mice after they reached adulthood (30 days) and discovered that the fear response was identical to the period immediately after they taught that response.

While I would not want to make too much over one experiment, this does suggest that fears developed in high school are harder to overcome and last well in to adulthood than do fears learned at other times in our lives.  Many of the students we work with suffer from anxiety disorders and often we cannot see the cause of their anxiety, because to adult eyes it seems too small for the effect it has created.

I am current directing The Glass Menagerie here at the school and anyone who knows the play can see that Tennessee Williams has intuited this mechanism.   Laura’s anxiety in high school is full blown agoraphobia in her early adulthood.  I suspect I am not the only who has an occasionally recurring nightmare set in high school.

One of the challenges of a structured environment like ours is how to prepare students for a world with few restrictions once they leave.

This question, along with the growing use of technology and online resources in the classroom, led to our decision last fall to require that all students be equipped with an iPad. Although the decision brought us new challenges, the results have been overall positive, and in ways we didn’t anticipate.

As expected, the iPads have broadened students’ access to digital resources in all academic subjects. But we’re finding that the benefits go beyond academics. Students have gone digital with their calendars, planners, and record-keeping, and the internal email privileges that went along with the iPads have significantly increased communication between students and staff. In many ways we are better serving students and our relationships with them have been enriched. Some examples:

- A staff member now keeps his sponsees motivated with daily inspirational emails.

- A student recently emailed his family leader with a request to change junior sponsors, something he felt more comfortable “talking” about in an email.

- When school president Mike Argiros came across “12 Most Intergalactically Enduring Life Lessons from Star Wars,” he promptly emailed them to his Nerd Herd students.

- A student dorm leader emailed his family leader one morning to advocate for what his dorm needed, sharing his observations and making recommendations.

Being able to send and receive ideas, information, concerns, complaints and requests using email is one more way of preparing students for the world they’ll re-enter when the leave, particularly the workplace where virtually all communication is now digitized.

As for the downside of our iPad decision, students are learning just how much time can be wasted online, even doing legitimate work. In one case, a student’s grades have fallen in several classes—although they have skyrocketed in one class where the teacher has made extensive use of the iPad in her lectures and assignments. The student found himself focusing on that class at the expense of the others because “it was fun.”

And of course student hackers can’t resist trying to get into the sites we’ve blocked (particular those devoted to sex, sneakers and rap lyrics). Fortunately, our IT people have managed to stay several steps ahead of them on most fronts. For students who have struggled with defiance, compulsive behavior, or who are easily distracted, the iPads have been especially challenging. But like other emotional and behavioral challenges, they are better faced within the therapeutic and supportive environment of FFS than out there. Better now than later.