Adolescent Brain and Alcohol Presentation

Very, very interesting presentation! First of all the presenter was very enthusiastic and very fond of what she was researching. She had a lot of different voices and made the presentation more enjoyable than I was expecting. She made a brain presentation really fun to watch. Her power point had a lot of interesting tools and different kinds of animations that made her presentation even better.

Even though her presenting was very well done, her information was also very good. She had a lot of good information that will help college students in the future. She talked a lot about how the brain develops and how we should act to keep our brains in the best shape it can be in.

One thing she really addressed was that alcohol kills brain cells. When a healthy brain learns a new task, it shows a lot of activity, which is what we want to see throughout the teen years. When people drink alcohol the brain slows down a lot. Alcohol is a suppressant drug; it slows-down brain activity throughout the brain. In the teen brain, the Hippocampus and PFC are altered, making it hard to learn and form new memories for a long time. Because it is the formation of new memories that develop us, problems don't show up right away. Alcoholism increases the younger a person starts using it. Teens are 5 times more at risk of having alcoholism. Research shows that during adolescence the brain is changing at such a rapid pace that any interruption in brain activity can have major consequences. The faster the brain is supposed to be going, the more interruptions cost, because it is NOT mature. The teen brain is more vunerable to toxins. Teen brains are so vunerable to addiction that the NIDA has declared alcoholism and other addictions to be developmental diseases, the risks are reduced as a person gets older.

The presenter also showed us a table of brains where it showed how the brain develops. The more yellow and red a brain is the less developed it is. When the brain is purple and blue it has matured and developed. The parts of the brain for safe driving develop last. The basic hand-eye coordination needed to drive develops in childhood, but the parts devoted to expanded attention and focus, judgment, identifying risks and forecasting consequences, risk management, and the complex visual-spatial calculations needed to drive safely develop in late teens and early 20s.

Overall the presentation was very well done. I learned a lot about the brain that I did not know before. There are so many changes that can happen to a brain that I am so amazed by. I did not know that the brain did all of those things.

High Stakes Community School

-Shows the estimated Net drop out rate-
In the High Stakes Community School I was one of the Drop out Coordinators. As a Drop out Coordinator I did not agree with the proposal. Many of the proposals account for many requirements that the students have to meet. This in turn makes kids who are less smart and capable to achieve these things to stay on task and focus on getting to the requirement level. They have to work much more harder to achieve these goals. If these students cannot stay up with the high achievers they are going to want to drop out of school because they are going to be stressed they cannot do it.
I agree that something needs to be done so that even the high achiever students are able to achieve at a higher level than they are already at. This does not mean that everyone has to raise their level of smartness. Some kids are not able to get to the level that the high achievers are at. I really think that the proposal should make the requirements a little less harsh. Students may get scared that they are going to have to be the best all the time and they won't be able to do that and end up dropping out.
The drop outs are going to be the students that are not as smart and cannot keep up with the standards and requirements. It is also going to be the high achieving students that are getting too stressed about doing homework all the time to keep up with the requirements.
This proposal overall is going to make kids very stressed. It may help them get better, but it may also hurt them. Not every student is the same. There needs to be something done that helps all types of people not just the high achievers.

What Makes Finnish Kids so Smart?

I really enjoyed reading the article "What Makes Finnish Kids so Smart?" It really made me thinkg about the United States and what we are doing with the education program. Finland students are among the smartest in the world. Americans finished among the World's C students. This shows that Finland teachers, educators must be doing something that America needs to get started on.

Sometimes I think that the U.S. pressures students to be really smart instead of letting them figure that out by themselves. The U.S. needs to reduce the standards on some things, so that children/ teenagers can experience more things and enjoy them while they are at it instead of hating it and not even trying to understand what they are doing. Children/teenagers do not always listen because a lot of the stuff they think they do not need to know. I feel this needs to be further analyzed because students should be able to have power of some of the things they are learning and be able to teach themselves how to do it instead of teachers always getting on them for not doing it right or having it due in a short amount of time.

Finnish students are able to have more free time and are not always hastled by teachers. The teachers also do not assign that much homework "high school students rarely get more than half-hour of homework a night." This means that Finland teachers are giving students some free time to experience things on their own and are not giving them any pressure to get things done in a quick amount of time.

Finland students do not have to deal with a lot of technology either. They do not have to worry about the stress that some U.S. students do about figuring out how to use technology. They also are not wasting their time on the internet searching Facebook or playing games. Technology in America is very important though. I agree with the U.S. that students should learn how to use it because in every day America they are going to be using it. I do not agree with children/teenagers being on the computer 24/7 checking their email and playing online games though. This makes children/teenagers less social and less focused on what's happening in the real world.

Overall, I really enjoyed this article because I now realize that America needs to do a better job of educating children and young adults. I feel that sometimes the U.S. needs to communicate with other countries and listen to what the other countries have to say about their program and what is working best for them, so that every country can become better and have smarter students all around.