Paly student tells of school stress

The parents bust their asses at startups, working late and weekends in their tiny rental, and it's not enough. They watch others their age and younger striking it rich with their acquisitions and IPOs.

(of course, both are doing just fine, and amazingly well compared to the rest of the world. But the toxic mentality remains)

I overheard two coworkers talking a few months ago - one parent saying that she didn't want to send her kids to PALY because she didn't think so much homework and stress was necessary - and referenced the suicide epidemic that's been occurring this year.

Another co-worker responded to her, 100% seriously, "Yea but if they survive, they'll probably get a great job"

It was sickening.

Similarly, what about university admissions "capping" the number of extracurriculars etc. they consider? Okay, you've already got your 4.0, you're already in a sport, you already play violin. It's great that you also have three other activities, but we're just going to add until we get you to 100% and stop counting. Enough with the wars between 140% and 150% overachievement.

You get what you measure. If it requires a perfect SAT score to get into Harvard, then people are going to take hundreds of hours from their young life that could be better spent learning something else or having a slightly balanced life and instead spend it studying and re-studying the SAT. It also unreasonably biases entrance against students who needed to work a little bit rather than study 24/7.

At some point when you're measuring the top 1% the margin of error becomes greater than the precision of the measurement. The real problem, as has been discussed elsewhere, is that the brand name schools haven't grown to accommodate as large of a population (by percentage) as they did in the past, to the point that they reject thousands and thousands of students who would have been accepted eagerly 50 years ago. In school and in life there seem to be fewer and fewer positions near the top, that provide lifestyles that seemed attainable not that long ago, given hard work.

"And it's an atrocity that staggeringly gifted young people can grow up thinking they're poorly endowed weirdos because, instead of memorizing their way through school, they struggle to actually understand things since their minds refuse to take “that's just how it works” for an answer, and they bother to "waste time" wondering, "What if...?"

This is exactly how I felt through school and did poorly because of it. I see these issues with my son too but he is excelling because I heavily encourage his curiosity and he has been lucky enough to have some great teachers that appreciate his obsessive need to have to know "why" or dig in deeper. I do worry though that he won't be so lucky as he moves into high school.

"It's really a sad thing that some kids with plenty of potential are misguided into thinking that a GPA is more important than knowledge, experience, curiosity, and comprehension."

This is so true. Something that recently really stood out to me was the lack of critical thinking or troubleshooting skills in kids. I discovered the lack of this in a summer workshop I was part of. Only about 10% of the kids (ages 8 to 12) had decent critical thinking or troubleshooting skills. The rest just wanted to be told what to do and how to do it. Why? Is it because we are so focused on getting kids to reach certain milestones that we are not teaching them or even encouraging critical thinking?

So what you're saying is you could drop 2-3 credits a semester, and still graduate on time?

> and I've also developed this weird problem where I profusely vomit several times a day.

I really hope you've seen a doctor about this.