College application season can be the most nerve-racking period of clip for any high school pupil. The combination of sorrow for non making better in school. uncertainty in your ain opportunities of admittance. and the fright of rejection is adequate to interrupt even the most stable pupils. Author Alexandra Robbins. nevertheless. realized that the emphasis of college admittance starts good earlier. every bit good as lingers good after. the existent application period. Through her observations. she concludes that the current instruction system is transforming pupils into GPA-obsessed. shockable existences. and that the emphasiss of using to a alleged “prestigious” university have a battalion of negative side effects.
Her first statement concerns how colleges and the full application system as a whole is consistently turning flesh and blood pupils into merely sets of Numberss. She explains how pupils presents are merely concerned about three Numberss: their SAT tonss. their GPAs. and their category ranks. She goes on to explicate that the compulsion with these three Numberss is doing pupils to lose sight of what high school is truly meant for ; acquiring a sufficient acquisition experience while fixing oneself for the tests of college life. Alternatively. high school has become a huffy elan for the best opportunities of being accepted into colleges. This trait is exemplified in AP Frank who. forcefully urged by his female parent. took all 17 AP categories Whitman high have to offer. an impossible work load that required he jump his tiffin period everyday.
Traveling off on a tangent. Robbins besides makes a point about the “no kid left behind” policy and badly criticizes it for coercing instructors to concentrate more on trial tonss instead than really learning. Early in the book. Robbins personifies her antipathy to turning pupils into Numberss in the signifier of college admittances counsellors. She believes that this group of people is the prototype of why the application systems are so flawed. and first puts Forth this thought by presenting the reader to Julie’s college counsellor. Vera. Vera is so haunted about her personal image and is so positive that Julie will ne’er be accepted into her dream college based entirely on her classs and trial tonss that she drops Julie as a client.
Robbins’ 2nd statement that makes multiple visual aspects throughout the class of the book is the averment that the high sums of emphasis experiences by high school pupils today is really lifelessly. In the quest to be accepted into a esteemed college. pupils today take work loads that at times is excessively much. doing them to mentally snarl. In this instance. an impossible work load is put onto AP Frank by his oppressive female parent. which Robbins provinces is rather common in East Asiatic states. but non all the overachievers have had their work load put onto them. Audrey. the sensed “Perfectionist” doesn’t needfully have every bit many grounds to be stressed as some of her schoolmates. but her mental province of holding to make everything absolutely causes her to be under unneeded emphasis.
For illustration. it wasn’t mandatary that she spend all of her weekends and free clip building the perfect span for her natural philosophies category. but her inclination to ever desire to be the best made it so. She spent clip in which she could hold been loosen uping or uncompressing on working smartly. The ensuing emphasis has been known to do pupil self-destruction rates to lift around the universe. Back at place. Julie besides feels the effects as she notices that her hair has begun to fall out. She dismisses it as simply the side effects of her academically demanding life. but what she fails to recognize is that stress-induced symptoms are the first marks of serious lasting harm and an increased likeliness that she will one twenty-four hours mentally interrupt.
Overall. Robbins points out progressively damaging defects in our current instruction system. such as turning pupils into informations and burthening them with potentially fatal work loads. She besides presents the information in a sense that allows the reader to link with the pupils of Whitman High on an emotional degree. which. in the long tally. better aid the reader understand the badness of the state of affairs.
