The last several years, I’ve been increasingly interested in expanding my knowledge about the teens I work with. My own children are elementary-aged, so it’s preparation for their own teenage years, but in the meantime, it’s is exactly right for my job working as a high school librarian.

Beside running a professional development course with the book Brain Literacy for Educators and Psychologists by Virginia W. Berninger and being able to apply the science to several books I have read recently (Proust and the Squid: The Story of Science and the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf– which has an update on my TBR list called Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World.) Then, there’s the book that I’m recommending to parents of teens, parents who WILL have teens soon, and those that work with teens in any capacity. As with many of the nonfiction titles I read because I’m curious about the topic, the Post-it count was high. I should really buy stock in the company.

Title: Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain

Author: Sarah-Jayne Blakemore

Copyright: 2016, then re-printed in 2018 by PublicAffairs

Relevance: As I said above, if you have teenagers (or will soon) and/or work with teenagers, books like these remind us of our own teenage selves, provide scientific research and snapshots of studies with conclusions we can use to better inform our interactions with teens. And it’s not all negative. We need to continue to learn about the brain as science speeds forth and isn’t what you knew during teacher training programs or even that book from twenty years ago when you just started out.

Ah-ha! Post-it note: Synaptic pruning occurs voraciously during adolescence and embodies the motto “if you don’t use it, you lose it”, which is being investigated as a cause of the education slump that occurs around middle schools years (at different points for everyone in their development process) in which grades and performance dip for a short period of time.

Memorable quote or fact: The brain takes of 1/5 of the energy used by the body.