Summary Of The Overpressured Student

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

    In discussions of Charles Murray, he expresses his opinion on the thoughts and feelings that are being transferred to students before college, claiming them to be misleading. Murray brings to light the problem that exists in the constant pushing of guidance counselors, teachers, and even politicians to aspire for a college degree no matter what, “treating every failure to go to college as an injustice” (Murray 48). Yet, by doing so, parents and students are often blindsided by the overwhelming cost of college that many cannot afford, or the sheer amount of education students would put themselves through for no reason at all. Murray observes that “one aspect of this phenomenon has been labeled misaligned ambitions, meaning that adolescents have career ambitions that are inconsistent with their educational plans” (Murray 48). Convincing students that college is the only guiding light to a better life forces students to see college as such, an intellectual heaven where they can become anything, such as a doctor or an attorney “without understanding the educational hurdles they must surmount to achieve their goal” (Murray 48-49). They then attend a four-year university with the depiction of college as a “place where B.A.s are handed out” fresh in their minds, thoughtless as to if that particular college they are attending even has the educational requirements needed to complete their career goals (Murray 49). Unfortunately, as Murray reminds us, this is the system that  is in place. For “a brutal fact

Students today undergo constant pressure for perfection, going through extreme efforts to meet this expectation. Alexandra Robbins, an investigative journalist and author of The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids, views modern educational culture as a danger to students because it advocates productivity over learning. On the other hand, Jay Mathews of the Washington Post believes that students today are more apathetic than stressed. Robbins perception of today’s schools is more accurate than Mathews’, for students cheat to appear smarter, burden themselves with grueling schedules to impress colleges, and develop mental disorders as a result.

As an English teacher at Wellesley High School, in the accomplished community of Wellesley, Massachusetts, David McCullough, Jr. confronts the paradox of reality versus the popular assumptions perpetuated by well-meaning parents and delivered a shockingly poignant attack on the Wellesley High School graduates’ self-perception and preparedness. In addition, he outlined the parents’ role in creating and maintaining this deception. Mr. McCullough used his knowledge and insight of the Twenty-first Century youth culture, humor, and steadfast opinion that his target audience of high school graduates is aphoristically, NOT SPECIAL. However, Mr. McCullough limited his audience’s sensitivity to his assertion using ethics, logic and pathos and later provides a positive, passionate and humanistic world view of how to have a well-lived life.

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.

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.

College pressures dominate our lives. They begin to levitate around us and slowly derail our lives. William Zinsser elaborates about the college pressures that modern generations are facing. He reveals multiple commonalities that the typical college student encounters on a daily basis. Zinsser states, “They want a map-right now-that they can follow unswervingly to career security, financial security, social security, and presumably, a prepaid grave” (12). He is spot on, the pressures demand my attention and won’t take no for an answer. So far I’ve gone head to head with these pressures every day since I started my freshman year in college. For the time that I’ve been here, my mind is overwhelmed and distraught with the amount of stress that gets piled on top of me every single day. I drown in these unrealistic expectations written in those faulty suggestion bars about how to be successful in college and college 101 tips. College pressures surround me like a dull gray cloud. It showers me with expectations and unfinished checklists. College itself is similar to carpooling to hell and back, but with no actual guarantee with a ride back.

The Overachievers by Alexandra Robbins is a non- fiction book that follows the lives of nine high school/ college overachieving students. On the outside they look healthy, happy, and perfect, but upon closer look the reader realizes just how manic their lives and the lives of many other high scholars are. It is no secret that high school and college has become more competitive, but the public doesn’t realize just out of control this world is. “Overachieverism” has become a way of life, a social norm. It is a world-wide phenomenon that has swamped many of the world’s top countries. Students are breaking under the immense amount of pressure that society puts on them. They live in constant fear that they will not live up to society’s, or

At a young age, we as a collective society have experienced the first-hand the struggles of attempting to be successful. We are told that excellence inevitably leads to success. We are told as children that one must go to college in order to be successful. As a result, children aspire to go to college only because we are told it is essential to be successful in life. The path to be a success is a stressful one and requires a great deal of work. There is too much homework, too many tests, and too much needless pressure is put upon the shoulders of young children by their parents. In her essay “Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?” Vicki Abeles argues and exposes the harmful effects of the drive for success. Abeles incorporates other ways to improve a child’s drive for success with consideration to the children’s health. One of her strategies for a healthier drive that would be beneficial and adopted by both college educators and fellow students is a limit on homework and weekend and holiday homework ban. Although a drive to be successful is essential for achieving excellence, limiting homework would be beneficial because it is less overwhelming for students, provokes less stress and

Student stress seems to be a major theme throughout the novel, The Overachievers: the secret lives of driven kids. The author establishes this theme by providing examples of the stress caused from academics to parental pressure. The cause of each overachiever’s problems seem to be stress. They stress over not being good enough even though they are all extremely knowledgeable and self-driven. Whether it’s not getting all As or not meeting your parents goals, each student in this novel suffers an incredibly unhealthy amount of stress, then they should.

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.

4. Roommate conflict is almost the first one that comes as starting life on campus. College students are forced to live with people who may have different values, beliefs, schedules, and habits than they do. There’s nothing worse than having to sleep in the same room as someone you’d normally hate or never talk to.

Many people in high school, mostly teens, experience dozens of pressure in their life. To be specific, Schoolwork. Most teens want to excel in school, but want to have a social life or play some kind of sport. One thing that teens don’t understand is that once you’re out of high school, you have college, and then maybe graduate school. Our education will not be over just in High School. You have to work hard and these four years of your life, will impact everything that you do. If you mess up even once, it may ruin everything. This article is named, “Teens Biggest Stress? School.” It has been featured on MSNBC.com. It is written by, “The Associated Press”. It explains how 13-17 years old have the most stress in their high school life.