Self-defense. Warning signs for depression and suicide. Racism in society. And the importance of math in real life.

The basics on becoming a teen-ager.

For seventh-graders at Perry Hall Middle School, the recent third annual Teen-age Survival Workshop was a chance to prepare for the challenges facing them as they enter their teen-age years.

"We learned stuff we're going to need when we're grown-up," said Nicholas Jones, 12. "It's important things we're going to use in high school and later."

Perry Hall's program began after teachers noticed the increasing number of difficulties their pupils were facing as they turned 13 and 14, said English teacher Deanne Panighetti, who coordinates the workshops.

"We had kids with eating disorders and kids with suicidal tendencies, and we had girls with their hair dyed every color and cut every which way," Panighetti said. "We wanted to bring professionals in to talk to them about the kind of issues they're thinking about and talking about."

With breakfast and lunch provided, the survival workshop was set up more like a professional conference than a regular day of classes.

The first year focused largely on hygiene and the dangers of growing up in the 1990s -- acquired immune deficiency syndrome, smoking, drugs -- and included only a portion of the school's seventh grade.

This year, over three days last week, all of Perry Hall's 480 seventh-graders have been learning about areas of interest that range from life-or-death issues to simply surviving socially as a teen-ager.

"I focus on extreme self-defense with these kids," said John C. Goss, president of Aikido of Maryland Inc. and a teacher at the Perry Hall program since it began.

Though Goss teaches martial arts to the Baltimore County and Maryland State Police SWAT teams, his lessons for the seventh-graders focused on the most basic, urgent survival techniques.

Handing a knife to his assistant, eighth-grader Kyle Sonneborn, Goss challenged Sonneborn to stick the knife against his throat. Goss then showed the seventh-graders how to quickly and easily deflect the attack and escape. He repeated the lesson with a prop gun.

"Self-defense should be simple so you can remember it," Goss told the pupils as he encouraged them to come up front and try it.

Elsewhere in the building, Jeff Filipiak -- a nursing student at Villa Julie College and Union Memorial Hospital, as well as the school's student nurse intern -- pretended to collapse in the middle of a classroom.

Seventh-graders went step by step through the process of checking Filipiak's breathing and pulse under the direction of Filipiak's fellow nursing student, Meghan Lambdin.

"What do you do quickly if you walk into a classroom and this is your teacher?" Lambdin asked, introducing the ABCs of cardiopulmonary resuscitation -- airway, breathing, circulation.

Other workshops included the dangers of smoking and the warning signs of depression and suicide -- topics of great interest among the seventh-graders.

"We learned about how many people suicide affects and how important it is to help your friends and listen to them," said Lauren Sala, 12.

At the end of the presentation from Melissa Azur, a senior counselor at Grassroots Crisis Intervention in Columbia, Lauren was shown that statistically two people would have killed themselves during the 30 minutes of the workshop.

"We need to be hearing this kind of thing," Lauren said. "There are a lot of big things that come with being a teen-ager."

Other lessons focused on subjects such as dating, teen parenthood, shoplifting and mathematics that aren't quite as life-and-death, but still important to the future teen-agers.

"I learned about the tools I'm going to need for success," said seventh-grader David Mical, 12. "It was about why I should work hard in my classes, because if I get a college education, I'll get more money when I grow up."

Pub Date: 3/15/99