The Teenage Brain: What's Really Happening

The session is part of the Middle School’s comprehensive health and wellness program, Benainu (Between Us), developed by Middle School guidance counselor Mrs. Vicki Hervitz ’05.

Students donned headbands labeled with several brain regions: cerebrum, cerebellum, hypothalamus, cortex, and temporal lobes. “As a part of the brain was discussed, characteristics of that part of the brain were taped onto the child,” explains Mrs. Finkelstein. “There was one student who had the sign ‘I am the center of the universe’ and that student received those traits! This visual lesson made the parts of the brain and their functions ‘come alive’.”

During the lesson, the children learned that the process of moving through adolescence is a slow process that involves many chemical changes. Hormones that are secreted by the brain initiate this amazing process and see it through to adulthood. To illustrate this process, Mrs. Finkelstein combined two ordinary looking chemicals, which "began to change color and ‘grow’ in the cup, producing heat, and then overflowing out of the cup while producing carbon dioxide gas, and ultimately hardening into a very lightweight but rigid foam,” as she describes.

Before it hardened, Mrs. Finkelstein stuck a straw into it, sprinkled glitter on the top, “creating something beautiful and magical...a ‘polyurethane glittered ice cream sundae’, which was a metaphor for the magnificent transformation that an adolescent goes through to become a responsible, young adult...amazing in the end!”

> View Mrs. Finkelstein's booklet, Jog Through the Teenage Brain
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Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community School

Learning together. For life.
Baltimore’s only Jewish independent preparatory school serving PreSchool through Grade 12.