I Refuse to Be Them
A little over halfway through my reading of Alexandra Robbins’ The Overachievers, I experienced a kind of mental breakdown. The book intensified a lot of my fears concerning grades, getting into college, and failure in general. It made me feel hopeless, like school had not even started and I was already drowning. The book’s outlook is very bleak, showcasing a cast of students with very similar motivations and goals to me in a way that is very depressing. Robbins spends the vast majority of her book detailing all the stress high-achieving students face without posing a feasible solution or alternative, and it got to be a bit too much. I know I fall into the category of “overachiever,” and the high school
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This is a deeply ingrained mentality that is first cultivated in the home. Robbins points out that parents who put their children on tracks to become doctors or lawyers before they even exit the womb are prime culprits. Coaching a three-year-old to ace an interview to get into preschool or putting an eleven-year-old in SAT prep courses puts really high expectations on them, according to the book. Parents that spend a ridiculous amount of money on extracurriculars, tutors, and college counselors make students feel pressured not to waste their parents’ money. For many high school students, acceptance to a college that is perceived to be “good” is the most important thing they could ever achieve. Unfortunately, parents are not doing enough to combat this perception. Offhanded comments about being disappointed with scores and doing better can really be taken to heart. It eventually creates the feeling that a child’s self-worth is tied to a number decided by an arbitrary grading system. If parents were to make a point to remind their children that they’ll be loved and successful regardless of the opinion of College Board, it could create children less obsessed with taking every single AP class available. A good support system is imperative in having a healthy school life. However, parents can only do so much on their own. The school administrators have to do
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
Journalist Alexandra Robbins ventures back to her old high school to examine the competitive efforts students are having to take to compete on the battlefield that is the education system in her book, The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids. Robbins explores the lives of multiple students who are stressed and pressured to maintain good grades and get into an Ivy League college. This text allows for intriguing insight on how the educational system has “spiraled out of control” and displays the different measures students must now take to be the best. Robbins’ The Overachievers is an eye-opening bestseller which exposes the social pressures and anxieties students must overcome in their high school lives as they attempt to impress and prove to colleges they are worthy of acceptance.
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.
Some people may argue that the main reason people go to college is not because they want to but because they “have” to. Could this be parents forcing their children out the door every day to college? Although many people dropout before graduating high school, there are a lot of high school seniors that persuaded or otherwise “peer pressured” by guidance counselors and parental guardians to attend college because it’s merely rightful. In “College Isn’t for Everyone,” W.J. Reeves argues that the concept of student and educator apathy is central to the issue of a four-year education not being a viable option for students, and open admissions
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 argues the point 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.
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.
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 argues the point 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.
Journalist Alexandra Robbins, in her book, The Overachievers, follows the lives of various high school students in order to demonstrate that students today are under extensive pressure from sports, standardized tests, the college application process, and school itself. Robbins effectively argues that the overachiever culture in America and throughout the world is severely detrimental to students and society as a whole. First, she uses logos and examples to prove her point. Her use of many anecdotes of varied characters from different areas of the country portrays the widespread effects of overachiever society.
“Kids who are the first in their families to brave the world of higher education come on campus with little academic know-how and are much more likely than their peers to drop out before graduation” (1). Many people believe that school isn’t for everyone, and whoever goes is privileged for doing so. Countless people in the world today do not attend college, and this is mainly due to an influence of those in their family. Perhaps they are unsupportive of higher education, their parents and family members may view their entry into college as a break in the family system rather than a continuation of their schooling and higher learning. Most of the first-generation students decide to apply to colleges, because they aspire to jobs which require degrees. However, unlike some students whose parents have earned a degree, they often seek out college to bring honor to their families, and to ensure they make a decent amount of money for their future.
Michelle Gardner Cooper AP Language 16 July 2014 Purloining Adolescence The Overachievers by Alexandra Robbins combines students’ struggles with little-known facts in order to convey her distaste for the current state of education in the United States. Personal stories of teenage overachievers form the bulk on this novel. Robbins is an authority on the affect extreme pressure has on high school students from having researched it thoroughly.
It is a well known fact but there are many people including counselors, parents, teachers, and friends who resist saying it out loud for fear it will sound like discouragement and negativity: college is definitely not for everyone. The pressure on high schools students, especially those that excel, to attend a college or university is enormous. And in the case of a bright, industrious and motivated high school student, attending a college or university is an obvious career choice. For those students, it's only a matter of what university to attend, whether one's SAT score is high enough, and the availability of the money. Then there are the millions of high school students who are not really personally motivated but are being pressured by their counselors, teachers and parents should they attend college if they really don't care? This paper examines those issues.
Students from all over the United States are told all through their life that they need to attend college if they ever want to be successful, however, this is far from the truth. Often schools are culprits for driving students to attend money driven colleges, in other cases it is family. While schools all too often make the push on students to continue their schooling, parents can cause the same situation, as they may not have a degree and be working a low-paying factory job. Now kids already don’t want to be like their parents when they get older, so seeing them suffer in poverty or barely above the poverty line can cause some dissatisfaction, further seeking a degree to live a life that they never got. What many
But for a lot of high school students, this definitely isn’t the case. If your child is looking to attend a competitive university, then her SAT/ACT score is more important than her GPA” (Patel, Shaan). So how is it fair that twelve years of going through school, matters less than three hours of your life. Some students work very hard to get above 3.5 and way higher grade point averages, and what matters more is just how well you do on one test. This also correlates to how much homework is given and how it is too much for some students.
For as long as I can recall there has been an enormous amount of pressure to exceed expectations in school. My parents would say things such as "Nothing would make us more upbeat at that point being able to say you got into Yale or Harvard" or "You ought to go to John Hopkins and be a doctor like my brother or go to Harvard law school and ended up a legal counselor." Measurably, I'd surmised that 80% of what my parents talked to me almost would be almost school. In my supposition, I am effective scholastically, therefore, the happy truth is that I have always been able to meet my parents'
Parents push their children so hard because they spend all their time and money and they believe if they do all of this, they will “form” a college scholarship for their child. Parents