biggest fear for an adolescent is written all the way throughout this text the biggest fear of an adolescent jesse not fitting in is not fitting in you talked about acceptance now to understand how this happens and how this looks and what this feels like i'm gonna have to do an activity this is an on your own activity and just this is this is not to tax you these are easy things this is just to kind of get you feeling what we're going to go over so everybody if you would take out a short piece of paper i'm going to pass out these papers and just keep them face down and if you would no one write on these write on your own papers keep them face down everybody have one if you would just do them one at a time and i will tell you when to do them everybody turn it over just do your own work and this isn't meant to be hard these are anagrams just do the first one only go ahead and solve it an anagram is rearrange the letters to form a word just one just rearrange those letters to form a word when you're done i need to see your hand raised okay keep going we'll wait keep your hands up please just do number one don't go on don't go on if this isn't meant to be difficult okay put your hands down let's just go to number two don't even worry about number one go to number two solve that one again when you're done i want to see your hands up everybody's hands down we're going to go ahead and do number three for number three rearrange the letters and as soon as you do go ahead and put your hand up here's what you need to know you were both given two different lists this side of the room was given these three words the left side of the room here you go they were given bat what would the word be the second one they were given lemon brian the word no melon they were easy the trick here was both of you were given the third word which was the same the third word was cinorama which was american your first two words on this side of my classroom were not solvable they were impossible tasks i'm sorry i'm sorry i know but here's what we did this for i was able to induce something called learned helplessness in the left side of the room very easily within about five minutes i want you to think about what happened to you this left side of the room when you saw the right side of the room raising their hands because they already had the task done what happened to you during that time jory you felt stupid you felt stupid okay i felt rushed felt rushed joelle i was even more confused you were even more confused because they all got it and you were still struggling chelsea frustrated frustrated what happened by the time you got to the third word because i'm here to tell you this side of the room is not significantly more intelligent than this side of the room that was a random assignment so what happened to show the differences why did you have more of a difficult time with the third word was the which was the exact same word brian my confidence was shot what you experienced was a term called learned helplessness how many have heard of the term before mr hands learned helplessness is often used in the academic literature to mean what jory basically they fail once or can't do something one time and then they apply that to everything in the future so all the future applications become skewed by that and here's the thing and this is what i want everybody to understand it's usually only used in the academic research you'll see it in ed psych books you'll see it in school textbooks when they talk about learning but i'm gonna challenge us to think about how learned helplessness can actually apply to the social scene can someone give me an example of how that might look tasha it's like when um a guy asks a girl out and he gets turned down he's not going to be willing to keep asking girls and he stops trying that's correct i want us to think about girls we've talked about reviving ophelia here i want us to think about how as we have been going through this book how does it apply think about friendships can you induce learned helplessness in friendships because it's tough to actually establish and maintain friends that's a difficult process jessie um if a girl sacrifices her morals once in order to gain like the approval of her friends or a guy she's more likely to do it over and over yes and i'm just gonna put this out there just to be explicit about it if carl becomes victimized one time in grade school is he likely to stand up for himself the next time no and then what happens the next time and the next time and the next time what we know that we have been learning about is girls have a cultural pressure to be quiet girls have a cultural pressure not to be angry not to use their voices and so if someone is victimized once if alison is victimized once we can take that same concept of learned helplessness and apply it to social relationships and so the moral of the story is it's very important for girls to practice and to be able to deal with that failure because our gut response what do we do when we fail our gut response is to close down and once you close down you do not open yourself up for learning any new ways for relationships