'teenage brain fog'
May 29th 2011 23:43
By Laura Catalano
Special to The Mercury
I’m looking forward to the end of the school year. I know it will bring a host of conflicts over messiness and schedule mix-ups and chores. And did I mention messiness?
Nevertheless, I embrace the start of summer break this year, mostly because school seems to be having an increasingly deleterious effect on my 13-year-old son’s memory.
Things have gotten so bad that lately I wince when someone, unable to recollect a name, a date, a place, uses the expression “I’m having a senior moment.” I believe that in order to be completely accurate this saying should be revised to “I’m having a middle school moment.” Because, as the mother of a middle school aged child — and two children who have passed through that phase — I happen to know that the most forgetful people on the planet are not senior citizens, but early teenagers at the end of the school year.
My son’s entire seventh-grade experience has been characterized by forgetting. First it was the occasional paper. Then a few lunches left on the kitchen counter. But over time, books started disappearing. And his homework assignments were so missing in action I wondered if they were taking a different bus home.
Over the course of the year, nearly all my son’s school books have, at one time or another, been left behind in a classroom like so many unraptured souls. Or else they’ve fallen to the bottom of his locker (which I’ve never seen, but believe may contain the first undocumented black hole on the planet).
Then, some time around the end of April, his school-related memory loss suddenly worsened significantly.
Right at this very moment, as I type, two books are lying on a chair across the room from me. They are two copies of the novel “Crash,” assigned by my son’s language arts teacher. One belongs to the school, the other to the local library. It has become common practice for us to make emergency runs to the library when a novel gets lost for days on end.
At one time, I had hypothesized that if we had two copies, he could keep one at school and one at home, thus eliminating the issue of forgetting altogether. Myth busted. Once, he actually lost both copies so we had to borrow a third from another library. (On a positive note, all three eventually turned up.) And today, I can’t help but notice, neither copy of “Crash” made it into school, even though I reminded him to put one in his backpack last night.
I’m wondering how much worse things will get before the school year finally ends. Last weekend, he misplaced his science homework. I found it Monday morning in his room. But, he wouldn’t have had homework in the first place had he not left another paper at home on Friday. Monday, after school was no better. He rummaged feverishly through his backpack, but failed to locate his math homework. On the bright side, his gym bag suddenly materialized, which was a surprise, since it had gone AWOL two weeks ago.
Recently, I became a bit worried about his declining memory. I did some research and learned there is actually a scientific explanation for what one article described as “teenage brain fog.” Apparently the frontal lobe of the brain isn’t fully developed in teens or tweens, making it more difficult for them to stay organized. This makes sense, although it doesn’t explain why brain function might nose dive at the end of the school year
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