The Big Wrap-Around

Over the summer a couple of fellow teachers and I have been pecking away at two major consolidations of TAS's programming. One is the Contemplation Concentration (CC), which I put into some context in the previous post. The other is an over-arching Art and Music curriculum.

One way of looking at adolescence is that even in the breeziest teenager these years are somewhat chaotic magnifications of adult life. Many deeply held beliefs and nearly unshakable habits are created during this time, partly as a function of neurology, partly as one of social and familial roles. Strong emotions create something of a whipsaw trajectory; these arise as the limbic system comes into its own. Judgment, perspective, functional empathy, and foresight are somewhat weak; this develops only as the frontal lobe becomes more dense and more connected with other regions of the brain.

None of these regions develop in isolation. The brain evolved to be profoundly shaped by its environment, which is why no genetic explanation for the vast range of normal behavior will ever be adequate. Conversely, this same brain-nature defies simplistic explanations based on social and environmental influences. Teenagers spend enormous amounts of time involved in school, and it is essential that this last, vast shaping opportunity not be wasted.

The word to keep in mind is "integration". This doesn't refer to a curriculum thoroughly determined, vetted and systematically relating one aspect of life to another, but rather a richly supportive emotional and social environment that makes each student's own integration and healing both possible and optimal.

Teenagers crave variety, change, action, movement, trust, emotional charge, stories, and seeing themselves reflected in a world they help create. This is the momentum one must work with, not against. A teenager's brain generally lacks the capacity to hold a stable self-perspective and to then analyze that perspective. This may be why a great variety of experiences seem to slip by your average teenager without comment or thank you. Their brains are furiously processing multiple layers of experience; to speak of them in real time or just after is nearly impossible for most kids.

This means that these experiences are certainly not wasted. Nor are they being stored for later use. They are being integrated below the level of awareness, and this requires time and space that is both nurturing and unobtrusive.

This is where having both a contemplative and an applied art program comes in. Each program has elements of action, academic study, and contemplation; the difference is in the proportion of each and how the student is brought into a new level of awareness.

All TAS students are required to take four years of art. The CC program is voluntary, as it requires a degree of maturity to participate in. Taken together they should frame a student's experience during these years in a powerful, enduring way.

Why a Contemplative Program?

I grew up in a Catholic family. Our parish was close to the center of our family life and both my parents were deeply involved in various aspects of the church. We were friends with all the parish priests and my father's family had deep ties, well back into the late 1800's, to Catholic Church politics and the political emergence of the Catholic vote in southwestern Connecticut.

I mention this because my own ambivalence about religious practice arises from long and deep experience with religious practice. Long ago I came to the conclusion that, despite some rather profound experiences- call them mystical or deeply moving, call them each a crisis or a bout of religious melancholy, those experiences were largely emotional and arose from things much more pedestrian than "God". But that being said, I was also thankful to have had the vocabulary and syntax of a life-long religious education to make sense of the experience, whatever the outcome in terms of my faith. I had been educated by the Jesuits to be a skeptic and yet would forever be shaped by the Catholic tradition.

At TAS, I teach Zen Sword and lead meditation. I counsel students, teachers, and parents, and try to set the general, day to day tone of our educational practice. No doubt my own quirks and flaws are at play throughout, and perhaps no where is this more evident in the Contemplation Concentration. It has taken some work to get it to this point, and there is a lot more to do.

Buffy (our art, cooking, and yoga teacher) and I, with some contribution from Matt (our reading specialist), decided that it was time to re-ground what we do at TAS in some deeper practices. Jen, the school therapist (currently on maternity leave), joined the school this year, bringing her own deep and daily practice as a lens for the complex problems that arise for our students. Zen practice, we all concluded, is developmentally correct for teenagers. It has the right mix of skepticism, discipline, moral probity, and reflectiveness for that time of life. Ten years of success at TAS has demonstrated this.

America is a tremendously dynamic, cosmopolitan country, with all the world flowing in and out. Religious practice in our country reflects this. Religious practice is so central to so many contemporary and historical questions that it seems essential to a well rounded education to have some direct experience with it. Most of our students do not have any. Merely providing some emotional support, some meditation, and some martial arts and yoga is not enough, however effective this might be.

Big questions- of existence, of love, of the why and what of one's life- must be grappled with in the years between childhood and adulthood. At this age the mind is evolving the ability to consciously involve itself in the world and be changed by it. A point of reference is crucial, as is the understanding that there are many other points of reference, both inside and outside of oneself. That is where the integration of our world view truly begins. Our contemplation program is an attempt to help this process along.

So many people become fearful during these years, and slowly circumscribe their worlds. TAS is dedicated to the proposition that being open to the world makes your life better and makes everyone's lives better, that openness is itself an act of courage.

Academic classes can only hint at what is out there. They are a menu, not a meal. If you look carefully at the CC program, you will notice that intellectual study is only one part. The rest is about seeking whole-life engagement with the self and others, with a lot of guidance. If adults do not actively participate in the spiritual and philosophical lives of the children in their care, then all the great questions of childhood and adolescence will be framed by other children and adolescents.

Please give our new program a good, long look.

Here is an interesting little item from the Times, on proofs of God and one's own journey.

What a Shocker

CHICAGO — Calls to poison control centers about teens abusing attention-deficit drugs soared 76 percent over eight years, sobering evidence about the dangerous consequences of prescription misuse, a study shows.

The calls were from worried parents, emergency room doctors and others seeking advice on how to deal with the problem, which can be deadly. Four deaths were among cases evaluated in the study.

Kids taking ADHD drugs to get high or increase alertness may not realize that misuse of the drugs can cause serious, sometimes life-threatening symptoms, including agitation, rapid heartbeat, extremely high blood pressure.

"They say, 'It's FDA approved, how dangerous could it be?'" said Steve Pasierb, head of The Partnership for a Drug-Free America, based in New York.

In the study, researchers from Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center evaluated 1998-2005 data from the American Association of Poison Control Centers. During that time, nationwide calls related to teen abuse of ADHD drugs, specifically stimulants, increased from 330 to 581 yearly, and there were four deaths. Overall, 42 percent of teens involved had moderate to severe side-effects and most ended up getting emergency-room treatment.

The true number of teen abusers who have bad side effects is likely much higher, because many cases don't result in calls to poison control centers, said study author Dr. Randall Bond, medical director of the hospital's Drug and Poison Information Center.

The surge, from 1998 to 2005, outpaced calls for teen substance abuse generally. It also paralleled an 86 percent rise in ADHD medicine prescriptions for kids aged 10 to 19, from about 4 million to nearly 8 million during that time.

"It's more bad news on an entrenched problem," Pasierb said. His nonprofit group was not involved in the study. Its own research suggests that about 19 percent of teens have abused prescription drugs including medicine for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

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