Expectations, Anxiety, and Stress Otherwise Known as High Sch
About 90% of teenagers in high school either have had a breakdown or will have a breakdown over stress. The amount of stress and pressure placed upon high school students now a day is down right ludicrous. Students have more than just homework to worry about.
An average student has to find a way to balance extra curricular activities, schoolwork, and a social life. If you add SATs, midterms, finals, drivers education, to the bunch you get large amounts of anxiety and frustration. An above average student has to worry about college level or advanced placement courses, volunteer hours and college tours. Teachers assign homework to students like they don’t realize that they have five (sometimes six) other classes to worry about. Of course the classes and homework are all preparing us for the next step we have to take in life, but teachers should conference with each other because the stress put on students can cause them to make take very poor choices; such as self medicating, plagiarism, and a numerous amount more. Teachers need to be more generous in the amount of homework and projects they assign.
They need to think about how many other things are on a child’s mind besides schoolwork. Einstein said, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live it’s whole life believing that it is stupid.” This quote can relate to the expectations set by teachers in high school. Not every one is going to be an above average student.
In fact not everyone is even going to be an average student. That being said people should not lay down specific expectations for a whole group of people just because they are around the same age. Everyone is different and we all have different things that we excel in. Someone can be an A+ student when it comes to science, have a poor grade in history and still succeed in life. The fact that a student’s future partially depends on their ability to excel in all areas of the academic life is like expecting a baseball player to play every position on the field at once. And that’s just a student’s academic life, on top of this students have to maintain a social life, because the skills they learn with their peers are mainly the skills that are going to be used in the real world.
This is where the image factor comes to play in a student’s life. Who they choose for their friends, whom they choose to be seen with and what they choose to be seen doing can take up more time in a student’s life than one would think. Students also have that inner struggle of making the right decisions and staying out of their trouble, and those often come into contact with their school life. Bad decisions made outside of school can effect how a student does in school and sometimes if that student can even stay in school. They also have to listen to the things their parents tell them to do, such as chores that can take time and focus away from the schoolwork they are supposed to be doing.
The point this essay is trying to get across is that more students would do better in school with a decrease in workload outside of school. Teachers should pay more attention to the fact that students do have other classes and a life outside of school to worry about. Not every student is going to reach the same standard as another student, therefore expectations need to be altered and shifted. Also, a students personal life away from school is what is most likely to carry them through the real world.
