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Middle school student rescued after tongue gets frozen to metal pole
By Catalina Gaitan
| GLOBE CORRESPONDENT FEBRUARY 12, 2014- ARTICLE
- COMMENTS
FILEScene from the 1983 movie “A Christmas Story” in which one of the characters gets his tongue stuck to a metal pole.Don’t try this at home or at school, for that matter.An Easthampton middle schooler, apparently undaunted by minus-10-degree temperatures, licked a frozen metal pole outside school Wednesday morning and had to be rescued after the student’s tongue became stuck, fire officials said.Firefighters were called at 8 a.m. to the scene outside White Brook Middle School.The incident was probably “kind of one of those ‘triple-dog-dare you to do it’ kind of things,” said Fire Chief David Mottor, borrowing a phrase from a similar incident depicted in the classic holiday movie “A Christmas Story.”Warm water was simply poured over the student’s tongue to free it from the pole, Mottor said. The youth’s gender and age were not disclosed.“When the ambulance crew got there, there was a staff member or two already there,” Mottor said. The student was not injured and was released back to school.“In the 20 years I’ve been working here, I can only think of one other time this has happened,” Mottor said, chuckling over the phone as he recalled a story involving some teenagers and a chain link fence post.“It’s not too common — knock on wood,” he said.Catalina Gaitan can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter at@catalina_gaitan.You gotta love those middle schoolers! What will they think up next? There is a method to their madness and that is that their new teenage brain gets caught up in the "awesomeness" of it all. Literally your teen's brain works differently than your brain. For instance if one of your friends dared you to put your tongue up against a freezing cold pole, you would go through a long process of thinking, its cold, my tongue could stick to it, and it will hurt like hell!!! So, no I will not take your dare. You are living and using your thinking brain, the frontal cortex. Your teen on the other hand, like this boy, had one thought after the dare, AWESOME!!! Let me at it!! Why because the teen brain works differently than an adult brain. Rather than using the thinking brain, a teen's brain activates first in the emotional center the amygdala, the AWESOME part of the brain before the thinking part of the brain kicks in. That would be when this kid's tongue is now stuck to the pole. Truly teens do stupid things because of biology. So when your teen does something that leaves you saying: "Are you kidding me, what were you thinking?????" Honestly they were not thinking, they were feeling. Keep this nugget of understanding around, it will come in handy. Not that it will change their behavior necessarily, but at least you won't be thinking how did my smart teen become so stupid! It's biology baby!
