Analysis Of The Overachievers : The Secret Lives Of Driven Kids Essay

Alfie Kohn’s Article “How Not to get into College” analyses many key factors of how the current school system does not work and how we as members of society need to work together extensively to remodel the system to ensure the success of future students by valuing education over grades. By looking at how students only join clubs and and worship numerical grades only to impress colleges; students facing pressure from parents, teachers, and society to get good grades and succeed in life; and how students live through many mental health implications due to a multitude of factors surrounding their educational life, we can determine that systemic factors of this society have turned students of this generation into grade grubbers.

As both the standards of school work and stress levels of student’s rise, the American school system remains unaltered, unchanged, and unaffected for over a hundred years. School is an institution that can serve as a massive gate in life granting you access to a job, stability, and a future or it can become a giant pillar in the way of everything you wish to achieve. While we recognize that a student’s own motivation, study habits, and will to learn, are cardinal in any schooling system, we must also understand the issues with an institution that is fundamentally unsound from the ground up. In today’s world, students are shoved with the hands of docility, and amenability as they render themselves in a system that has inadvertently failed them, by neglecting to celebrate their differences, and varying learning patterns. Conformity in the education system has shown to damage the personalization and

Every fall millions of American adolescents gear up to apply for the thousands of colleges and universities across the nation. For many students this process is a simple-natural progression through a linear educational track in which no extra preparation, beyond a paper application, is required. However, for many students college preparation can begin as early as conception. Alexandria Robbins follows the stories of nine students from Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland. Whitman is known for and could be summarized by a simple term in which Robbins’ book is also titled: Overachievers. The author explores the hectic nature of helicopter parenting, bureaucratic admission processes, the culture of Ivy (a term describing the upper

While reading Ken Bain’s book “What the Best College Students Do” of the five different types of students he describes, I feel like I fall under the label of one having mediocre grades but achieving success. I make good grades, however I do not necessarily believe my grades always reflect my hard work, determination and effort put in, similar to his theory on false hope in standardized testing. Throughout my school career, I have consistently made A and B grades. I can remember only one C grade, which was a quarter grade, and very disappointing, but a lesson learned. At the same time though, and as Bain helped me realize through his text, grades are not everything and making a C is not something that is going to kill me; there is simply more to school than a letter grade. In fact he points out through most of the 1800s schools only used two grades, pass or fail. As seen nowadays, schools have since adopted the letter grade system.

These expectations are set in hopes that they will help students get into prestigious colleges. An NPR report featured teenagers Tom Poulis and Chelsea Halprin, who shared their thoughts on stress related to high school schedules. Poulis says, “the stress level is very high” due to taking four AP classes, standardized tests, and participating in various after school activities to enhance his college applications. Halprin hoped to attend an Ivy League school. Her schedule included time for homework, class president duties, team sports, mentoring young students, and helping at her synagogue. Despite her impressive schedule, Halprin worried that it would not be enough to meet her goals. The idea that students must overwork themselves and excel in every area has become an emotional and mental burden on teenagers, rather than be a guide to a successful

In the story “I Just Wanna Be Average” the author Mike Rose argues that society very often neglects and doesn’t see the full value and potential of students.

Murray applies the rhetorical appeals of pathos, ethos, and logos throughout the essay. His rhetorical appeal on pathos is used to help promote his view on society’s misalignment of understanding that all youth should be prepared to attend college. He argues that a student who has the natural abilities for liking the stringent work it takes to complete a college education, and whose SAT scores meets the threshold for college readiness, is more likely to succeed than a student that does not have those same abilities. Because these student s are grouped as one and are all given one option the students who do not have those abilities are being set up to fail ( Murray 227). Murray’s ethos appeal propose that guidance counselors and others with a vested interest in a student’s should take heed to the student’s strengths and they may realize college is not the best option. Murray argues, “Guidance counselors and parents who automatically encourage young people to go to college straight out of high school regardless of their skills and interests are being thoughtless about the best interests of young people in

Being admitted into college is a difficult process, one that requires students to be diligent in their studies, engage in a number of extracurricular activities, and overcome the everyday pressures and challenges that high-schoolers face across the country. Admittedly, not everyone in the United States is born with the same opportunities as socioeconomic factors as well as historic injustices have contributed to a society in which some people are far more likely to achieve upward mobility – of which, obtaining a college degree is a necessary part – than others. While there is need to rectify this reality,

The goal of wanting to succeed is quite natural for everyone. It is not unjust to assume that all students want to become successful as well. However, some students are more determined to succeed than others and take extreme steps to do so. Richard Rodriguez’s The Scholarship Boy discusses the issue with scholarship students. He argues the overachieving student has an eager obsession with learning. Although Rodriguez addresses the scholarship boy obsession with success, he fails to describe the undergoing stress of the overachieving student.

My high school years, unlike the past years of steady achievements, felt much more like a sine graph with ups and downs. To begin with, I conquered my freshman year in a breeze. My easily achievable classes not only earned myself confidence, but also admiration and respect from my classmates and teachers. As a result, I comfortably acclimated myself to the status of a star student.

In the novel, Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids, author, Alexandra Robbins conveys the message that today’s society, including school systems, parents, friends, and students themselves, puts so much pressure on students to succeed (which means doing well well on standardized tests having high GPAs/class ranks, and being accepted into prestigious schools and universities.) This extreme amount of pressure can result in students not learning as much while at school, as well as unhappiness and other issues. Robbins conveys this message throughout the novel by following multiple students around school at Walt Whitman High to discover what the “perfect” overachiever secretly goes through in order to be successful.

On December 2, 2016, in the opinion editorial, “How to Get In,” Susan Estrich, best-selling author and liberal columnist for the Creators, argues that hard work, not college acceptances, determine people’s future successes, challenging the notion that people’s opportunities and potentials are defined by the colleges they enter. Refuting the misconception that “getting into the right college is a meal ticket for life,” Estrich argues that GPA’s and LSAT’s may decide the difference between rejection and acceptance, but ultimately, tenacious hard work throughout life counts “for more than anything else,” before concluding that the “secret to a good application” is honesty and that, although she understands admissions can be partisan and erroneous through personal experience, in the end, she “did just fine”- an echoing sentiment to all prospective college applicants. Estrich

Overachievers, by Alexandra Robbins, is an exposé about the lives of driven high school students at Walt Whitman High School in Maryland. Throughout the book Robbins central argument is that college admission expectations have made high school a very cut-throat environment, leading students who try to meet these expectations to have deteriorating mental and physical health.

Paul Tough, author of How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, takes on a tough topic of figuring out what components enable a child to succeed. Throughout the book he makes several claims that are related to poverty, attachment, and character. We believe all three of these items play a critical role in how children succeed. We will provide evidence to support these claims as well as critique them.

Yet, the education does not stop at middle school, for high school really puts all the basic skills from elementary and middle school to work as the assignments and the exams become more challenging. We do not only learn about reading, writing, history, and math, we learn about the people around us as we associate with different personalities, and as we see what we have grown up to be and what we want to be later in life. Accordingly, the high school years are a time when teachers emphasize the importance of graduating and attending college in order to have a “succesful future.”