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The issue is not about doing well in college. The pervasive mentality is that if you don't get a 4.8 weighted GPA with 12 AP courses, you will not get into an elite college, and therefore you are a failure.
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Paly student tells of school stress
61–70 of 90 posts
Re: Paly student tells of school stress
#62Re: Paly student tells of school stress
#63I went to Homestead High School (and have friends that went to Gunn/Paly) and the experiences I've witnessed have been similar. One of my friends has parents that worked at Adobe. During his junior year, he was taking AP Calculus BC, AP Physics C E&M, AP Physics C Mechanics and AP Computer Science. He got straight A's both semesters, and got a 5 on all of the AP tests. I went over to his house during the summer and f…
On the other hand, the parents are outliers, and rose above their peers. Would you expect them to be happy if their children were mediocre? After all, what are genes for?
Would you expect them to be happy if their children were mediocre? After all, what are genes for?
I hope you're being sarcastic, but in case you're not, my answer is "yes, I would expect them to be happy if their child is mediocre." It is my hope to not have to explain why.
Re: Paly student tells of school stress
#64I went to Homestead High School (and have friends that went to Gunn/Paly) and the experiences I've witnessed have been similar. One of my friends has parents that worked at Adobe. During his junior year, he was taking AP Calculus BC, AP Physics C E&M, AP Physics C Mechanics and AP Computer Science. He got straight A's both semesters, and got a 5 on all of the AP tests. I went over to his house during the summer and f…
On the other hand, the parents are outliers, and rose above their peers. Would you expect them to be happy if their children were mediocre? After all, what are genes for?
Yeah, I really would. Source: parent.
Re: Paly student tells of school stress
#65I get what these articles are trying to imply but I'm not seeing hard figures.
Is it really worse in these locations and is it really worse than the old days?
Poor rich kids and the poor youth of today is a meme that's decades old, I need hard figures that this time it's different.
Re: Paly student tells of school stress
#66I went to Homestead High School (and have friends that went to Gunn/Paly) and the experiences I've witnessed have been similar. One of my friends has parents that worked at Adobe. During his junior year, he was taking AP Calculus BC, AP Physics C E&M, AP Physics C Mechanics and AP Computer Science. He got straight A's both semesters, and got a 5 on all of the AP tests. I went over to his house during the summer and f…
Pretty lulzy considering Adobe and Intel are both extremely mediocre, even in Silicon Valley.
In what way? Intel makes the best CPUs in the world and Adobe makes the best photo editing software in the world. How are they mediocre?
Re: Paly student tells of school stress
#67I went to Homestead High School (and have friends that went to Gunn/Paly) and the experiences I've witnessed have been similar. One of my friends has parents that worked at Adobe. During his junior year, he was taking AP Calculus BC, AP Physics C E&M, AP Physics C Mechanics and AP Computer Science. He got straight A's both semesters, and got a 5 on all of the AP tests. I went over to his house during the summer and f…
On the other hand, the parents are outliers, and rose above their peers. Would you expect them to be happy if their children were mediocre? After all, what are genes for?
Yes, Why not?, their parents were outliers in their environment and in their time. Mostly they will be worse than their children if they were to do that same now. It is simple stupidity to expect the kid to be like us. Parenting should be giving advice, support and teaching the right things. How the kid grows up is up to him/her. I for one believe that if you do everything for kid pretty much you are live their life and they don't have anything to look back and either be happy about a decision or sad and hence they never learn.
Re: Paly student tells of school stress
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Students are now asked to give up their present for a chance at a good future. So... an investment?
It's more than that, unless you consider investing your physical health part of the deal too. As a current mechanical engineering junior, the expectations have gotten really quite insane. In order to graduate on time you have to be taking 15-18 credits of the hardest classes offered at university. Right now I'm in an 18 credit semester, and next I will be taking 17 credits. Currently I'm in fluid mechanics, finite el…
Hey corporate experience of 17 years and most of them were fortune 500 companies. Unless you want to be inventor or world leading scientist ... you don't need anything. Do avg in college join a big company in simple position work your way up (smart or hard whatever works for you) and use your common sense you will become evp/coo if not a ceo.. none of the college shit matters in companies which is were you will end up...
Re: Paly student tells of school stress
#69Education in Asia, especially the main cities in the developed nations (Shanghai, Singapore, Seoul etc. ) is pretty much exactly the same. There's many purposes to an education, manifest and overt ones. For example, keeping youths neatly congregated and managed in singular locations, socialisation into specific social archetypes of value etc. We may say that an education is about Finding Your Passion and Being An Edu…
There are a very high percentage of foreign-born parents all over the Bay Area. Last time I checked, for example, more than 30% of the residents of Alameda county were born outside the US.
One factor, in my opinion, is that for a lot of immigrant parents, their success in education enabled them to move to Silicon Valley. Education changed their lives and, many would say, in a hugely positive way.
So they apply that same perspective to their children's education and expect the kids to have the same educational experience they did.
The problem for the kids is that what it takes to succeed in the US is different from what enabled their parents to get into the US in the first place. It's not clear to me what the implications of that are, but boldness, innovation, insight, team spirit, leadership, and a lot of other desired attributes don't get discovered by students because they have no opportunity to allow them to emerge.
Re: Paly student tells of school stress
#70I went to Ithaca High School in upstate New York which I think got this right, at least more right than a lot of other places. The freshman and sophomore classes were like Carolyn describes in that they had lots of homework and I felt very overwhelmed. However as I got in to the higher level classes homework became optional. Most people don't believe this but I actually had an AP Calculus course with 100% optional homework, I didn't do a single assignment the whole year. The reason our teachers gave for this was that it was teaching us manage our learning, something that would become crucial next year in college. Of course, this puts a huge emphasis on the test since it's almost 100% of your grade, which is stressful too. But that felt a lot more fair to me. Our teacher gave us concepts that he was expecting us to have mastered by test time, great lectures on those concepts and homework containing problems which were similar to what we'd face on the test. The rest was up to us.
In my opinion this system really works, I was already a strong math student coming in but this class solidified my love of it and I wound up majoring in Math. People have a certain cynicism about topics like this, because on some level it's a zero sum game. Everyone wants to be above average but that's clearly not possible. I don't think you can completely remove this stress, nor should we want to, it wouldn't be preparing you for life if we did. But we can substantially reduce it with different teaching methods and I fail to understand why these teaching methods are beyond considering for most high schools.