The expectations for the ideal high school student are beyond unrealistic. If you are currently a high school student, you know that to be true and live that reality every day. For those of you who aren't, let me paint a picture for you.
The average student is expected to maintain decent grades. This is mostly so the student will have an array of schools to choose from when they go to college, IF they choose to. Which, now seems to have become the norm, the expectation, and half the purpose of the work were assigned.
With more students going to college, of course the selection process is going to become more competitive so to a lot of kids, a C is nearly unacceptable even if it’s truly the best they could have done. When the average becomes unacceptable, the whole system becomes corrupt.
Students are expected to be involved. Whether this is with a sport, theater, a club, it doesn’t really matter. We are told that colleges look for extracurricular activities on resumes. But they also look for consistency, so if you haven’t found your “thing” by junior year, you better have the grades and community service to make up for it.
Trying to incorporate all these things into a daily schedule is as simple as just never sleeping at all, ever. In fact, according to ScienceNews.org, at least 70 percent of teens are sleep deprived and experience a weekly sleep deficit of, at a minimum, 10 hours. Lack of sleep is proven to impair learning, but that doesn’t seem to matter to those creating expectations for these tired but driven students. Not only are we busy, but we are exhausted and practically running on caffeine just to get through the day.
Realistically, if you go to school for seven hours, rush to a club meeting or sports practice every day, go home to do homework, eat dinner, and go to bed at a decent hour, keep your sanity and not have a mental breakdown every once in a while, you’re doing extraordinarily well. But that’s just the first layer of daily student life. What about spending time with your family and friends? What about spending time doing something you enjoy that isn’t school related? What about getting a job? What about learning to drive? What about doing things that make you happy? There's simply no time.
I’m not saying that these expectations don’t show any logic at all. Students should try hard in school, try to get involved, and maybe try to volunteer if they have the time and personal drive to. The future is important and education can be crucial to many career paths. However, there’s a point where a student’s resume needs to take the backseat to personal needs. There needs to be an established balance between school and social/personal life for a student in order for them to develop into a well-rounded person once entering the real world.
For the most part, this whole nasty cycle is dependent on the idea that grades and school must come first. Before mental health, before physical health, before family and friendships. The current education system, on the surface, tries to promote the message of “get involved and enjoy your high school experience,” but on a deeper level, it focuses on the building of your resume and getting into a good college as a first priority. By forcing students into this mentality, school is no longer about learning. It’s about passing. It’s simply about keeping your head above water, which quite frankly, is unacceptable.
By making school a student’s number one priority, it can take away their sense of individuality. They aren’t a person, constructed of likes and dislikes and strengths and weaknesses and interests anymore, they’re a number on a page. A GPA, a faceless resume. I am all for trying your best in all aspects of life including school, work, clubs, whatever it may be. At the same time, we all must be careful not to get lost in that. Sometimes we all need to take a step back and remind ourselves that our grades do not define who we are and we are more than what’s on our resumes.
