It would seem logical that with newly acquired mental capabilities, junior highers would be anxious to excel academically and to put their improved brain power to work,but the opposite is often true. For many junior highers, the quality of schoolwork goes down, not up, during their early adolescent years . Kids who may have excelled academically during their prejunior high years often do quite poorly when they reach adolescence, much to the dismay of parents and teachers alike. Junior highers seem intellectually lazy and bored with learning. This is something called adolescent relapse and it poses a frustrating problem for both school teachers and junior high workers in the church .
As I wrote earlier, some people have distributed this development to a decrease in brain growth which occurs during early adolescence, but such an explanation is not only dubious but overly simplistic. There are other good reasons why adolescent relapse is normal and to be expected.
First, one has to keep in mind that early adolescence is a time of rapid growth and enormous change. Kids are growing and changing in every area of their lives and this result in some major distractions. There are what I call other urgencies that take priority over academics at this time in a young person's life. Getting good grades simply becomes less important than making friends, falling in love, separating from parents, looking good, fitting in with the right group, and becoming popular. There is a lot going on in the life of the early adolescent, to say the least. To expect a junior higher to be a good student at this time in his life is not always realistic. It's not easy for school teachers (or junior high workers in the church)to make history lessons (or Bible lessons) interesting enough to prevail over these "other urgencies ". It is often not until the 10th,11th, or even the 12th grades that young people develop a driving intellectual curiosity and a pleasure from dealing with ideas. This makes designing junior high curriculum a real challenge for everyone involved.
A second reason for adolescent relapse, closely related to the first, is the newness of not only their new thinking abilities, but the educational setting in which they must learn. Most junior high and middle schools require early adolescents to adjust quickly to an entirely new way of relating to their teachers and their curricula. Students often have difficulty getting themselves organized for each class and being responsible for their assignments without a teacher watching and guiding them every step of the way, as is usually the case in elementary school. For a time the disorientation that early adolescents experience can negatively affect their school work.
Thirdly, because of all the internal changes they are experiencing, junior highers have shorter attention spans and shorter concentration levels than other age groups. This is handicap that forces them to work twice as hard to learn about the same as they did in elementary school. This can be discouraging for young people who are doing their best but doing worse. Teachers can help students by reassuring them that they are doing fine and that eventually all their hard effort will pay off.
Another cause of adolescent relapse has to do with motivation. Junior highers are not sufficiently motivated to perform at a high level academically. They are actually between motivations. When they were younger they were motivated to do well in school because it pleased their parents. They would bring their papers home from school (with good grades on them) and their parents would proudly display them on the refrigerator door. This motivated them to continue to get good grades. When they get older, they will again be highly motivated by a desire to be better equipped for adulthood, to get a good job, or to expand their knowledge on a particular subject. But during the early adolescent years, they are caught between these two motivations. They are motivated neither to please their parents nor to prepare themselves for adulthood.
