The Norms Within The Classroom

In article How Kids Learn Resilience, Paul Tough argues that stress can push a child into a cycle of failure in school, harmfully impacting a child’s education and outside life. He claims that stress is apparent in every student’s life; however some have more and this stress has a direct connection on the child’s success both in school and out. Stress can be caused by many things, such as economic, family, or even social problems. The stress prevents a student from staying focused in school because they are distracted by other problems. Since they are not able to focus, they do not perform well at school, leading to bad grades, which leads to more stress. This cycle continues and the student is unable to learn as the workload gets more complicated.

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.

One of the biggest problems among students within post-secondary are the struggling issues of mental health such as depression, anxiety or stress which leads to the failure of adequate nutrition. The age of when mental disorders are clear to one’s self is between the age of 18 to 24 as this is the age of many adolescents are going into higher education (Kessler et al., 2005) . University students who struggle with depression and anxiety majority of the time is caused by the academic stress of being a leading cause of their mental health. As a survey was conducted by campus counselors, many found an outstanding factor of parental pressure for high grades from their child causing many students stress, depression and anxiety which elevates expectations within the student (Watkins et al. 2001, p. 322). These high rates are due to the feeling of being badgered to achieve high grades and maintain their grades while balancing their social life.

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 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.

These students put so much time into tasks that ultimately lead nowhere and place needless stress on the student. All this stress has caused, “more than half of American teenagers [to be] stressed out all of the time or sometimes”, and there have even been reports that “Eating disorders are another pervasive health problem that can be caused by stress, particularly, doctors say, when students are perfectionists.”. The amount of stress being placed upon teenagers by their school and parents, has caused a number of serious health problems. For example, in the novel “The Overachievers” a student by the name of Julie experienced significant hair loss due to the amount of stress she was feeling, and another student mentioned named Alyssa, suffered from eating disorders that served as a coping mechanism for all the stress she was experiencing. These are only a few of the repercussions resulting from the justification of an overachiever lifestyle that puts a student’s grades above the overall wellbeing of the

The Overpressured student A recent study conducted in New York University found that, “ Nearly half (49%) of all students reported feeling a great deal of stress on a daily basis and 31 percent reported feeling somewhat stressed. Females reported significantly higher levels of stress than males (60% vs. 41%)” (James, 2015). Many schools and parents brainwash their students to believing that in order to succeed in life one must pursue education to the highest degree. The argument ‘The Overpressured Student’ by Richard Weissbourd, argued that students are drove to be overachievers in education which causes an imbalance in schools. By combining ethos, logos, and strong premises; the author adequately persuades the reader.

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

My day just started and I’m already beyond stressed; I had to wake up, fix my hair, put on makeup, find my suit, and then bring myself here, ugh. As a high school student, I go through a good bit of stress trying to juggle advanced placement classes, clubs, a social life, a job, and writing this oratory; it seems like I never get a break. According to the American Psychological Association, high school students score a 5.8 on a ten point scale of stress during the school year, whereas adults score a 5.1. To put those scores in context, the APA suggests that the healthy level for a high school student is a score of 3.9. Clearly, teens are inundated with high levels of stress, and to make matters worse, the adults around them often refuse

“Helping students develop mathematical dispositions in which they share their ideas, discuss others’ ideas, and so on, is always a challenge,” (The National Council of Teachers Mathematics, 2003, P. 151). I found this quote and reading to be very relatable, in the sense that students can often struggle to come up with their own ideas. This was definitely true for me and my group when we were working on the locker problem in class. In the book and in class, discussions can really benefit students and keep them engaged. “To encourage all students to contribute to discussions, the teacher should ask other students to explain their classmates ideas,” (The National Council of Teachers Mathematics, 2003, P. 153) this statement made me think of dialogic teaching. Dialogic teaching is students having a rich discussion amongst each other while being guided by the teacher. The students find out the answer on their own and the teacher does not tell them. So social norms and classroom management plays a big role when students problem solve.

That can be easily attributed to a great support system at home. However, for some students their journey is a difficult one, full of obstacles. In Parkay’s third chapter titled “Today’s Schools” he states, “Increasing numbers of young people live under conditions characterized by extreme stress” (p.86). School has a tendency to be stressful on its own, regardless of grade level. To have stress from school, and then have stress from family at home can only make the learning process a whole lot harder. When one refers to stress it can have a variety of different meanings. Anything from being treated wrong to not getting enough food can lead to stress. The type of stress Parkay highlights is the stress put on children by lack of parental stability. He states, “10 percent were victims of other types of maltreatment, including threatened abuse, parent’s drug/ alcohol abuse, or lack of supervision (p.90). As cliché as it sounds, every student needs love and support from their parents. It is of great help when a student knows his/her parents support them and want them to

Liz stays up every night until midnight doing homework. She barely has any time for leisure because of extracurricular activities, and also plays year round sports. When Liz comes home everyday she is overwhelmed by the amount of homework she has. Her parents have very high standards of her and expect her to have a 4.0 GPA all throughout high school. She is constantly feeling pressured to go to college from her parents and forced into a career that she does not want. Students are receiving too much pressure to go to college from high school. Many say college is less stress and less homework than high school. Some studies say that stress may help a student to keep organized

Kumashiro and Ladson-Billings truly reinforced the goals I have for teaching. One of my goals as an educator is to show students how to deconstruct norms set forth by history, to question the common-sense norms that exist today and how they affect people depending on a variation of identities. Ladson-Billings equates this anti-oppressive pedagogy, at a basic level-regarding educator preparation coursework, as “preparing teachers to teach in ways that disrupt, challenge, work against, and critique the status quo.” (Kumarshiro, 2009, p. XVII) Before I teach my own students, I must challenge and critique the foundation in which we are taught on, in terms of educator prep. I have found that educators must get comfortable wearing multiple hats.

High school is the time where students feel the pressure to make sure their grades

Now, how many of these students do not typically undergo an encouraging experience within America’s high schools is what’s unsettling. Flipping through 3 significant sources, what was most commonly reported as a typical mood of a High School adolescent was stress, being the most talked about characteristic. Sophie Bethune notes that “Teens report that their stress level during the school year far exceeds what they believe to be healthy (5.8 versus 3.9 on a 10-point scale)” (Teen Stress Rivals That of Adults, apa.org) while Dr. Rosalind Dorlen on another source mentions that a majority of the symptoms reported from adolescents experiencing an abundance of stress include “a high level of stress are persistent and ongoing anxiety and depression, elevations in blood pressure and other somatic complaints.” (High School Seniors and Stress, stress.lovetoknow.com).