Parents of high-achievers are getting the message: Stop the pressure. But what happens when your kid is the one refusing to let up?
My daughter, Kerry, like most college-bound high school juniors, just took her SATs. Watching her prepare, I found myself on board with the movement to reduce academic anxiety in kids. In her new film Race to Nowhere, a mother named Vicki Abeles examines the high-stakes culture that has invaded some schools, creating unhealthy, unprepared, and stressed-out youth. To address the problem, places such as Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill have gone as far as eliminating that crown jewel of the college application, the Advanced Placement course. But even as I plead with Kerry to take it easy, she keeps the pressure on herself. What’s a father to do when his daughter is the responsible one?
I’ve thought about this a lot lately. A couple of months ago, I stepped to the podium of a lecture hall at Wesleyan University. Before me sat 130 parents of high school juniors, finishing an elegant dinner. Their kids slouched in chairs around the edges of the room. The students assumed bored looks, but I had seen anxiety surface in many of them during the long day of college application seminars.
My job that evening was to introduce Wesleyan’s charismatic president, Michael Roth, and say something profound about the college selection process. I spotted Kerry at the back of the room. Her head was down. I have a history of over-sharing, so I had promised not to say anything that would embarrass her. The truth is, I wasn’t sure what I could say about the process that was positive.
In my opinion, so much of what happens to our high school students is wrongheaded. They are told the college they get into will determine everything from getting the right job to meeting the right spouse to finding happiness. By age 16, they’re supposed to know exactly who they want to be when they grow up. (I’m 46 and still have no clue.) I know that my daughter’s future worth will not be decided by her choice of college, but I doubt she believes it.
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Kerry goes to a private high school in Cambridge, a place with one of the best track records in the state for getting kids into Ivy League colleges. The fact that she first reported this reputation to me when she was still in middle school scared me to death—it tipped me off to how much pressure she was already under. I’ve never cracked open a college guide, but I recently discovered Kerry had been secretly studying them for years.
I’ve realized that the best thing I can do for Kerry is lead by example. So I don’t judge her college list, and I didn’t pay thousands of dollars for SAT prep courses. I tell her that she shouldn’t tie her self-worth in any way to which colleges send her fat envelopes, which send thin ones.
Instead, I encourage Kerry to do the things she loves simply because she loves them. She has a passion for acting, and though I think she’s amazing, she doesn’t expect to premiere on Broadway any time soon. But that’s why I’m so happy she sticks with it: She acts only because she enjoys it, not to seek advancement in some cosmic pecking order.
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At the Wesleyan podium that day, I spoke haltingly of how old I suddenly felt, and how I would cry when Kerry left home. Then I found my voice. “The day my parents dropped me off at college was perhaps the best day of my life, because it was the first day of a great adventure,” I said. Yes, I studied hard, but I learned the most from the friends I made, the parties I attended, my dumb mistakes and embarrassing failures. “Our children are under so much pressure to succeed in a very narrowly defined way,” I said. “The point, however, is to give them the chance to have an adventure and learn about themselves in the process.”
I saw Kerry look up. I am not sure she was listening—with adolescent girls, it’s hard to tell—and I don’t think she was entirely convinced by my argument. But when she finally receives her SAT results, I’ve already figured out what I’m going to tell her. If she does great (as she probably will), I’m going to say she needs to pick a college where she can have an adventure. And if she doesn’t do as well as she expects, I’m going to tell her the same thing.
[This story ran in the Boston Globe Magazine on Januray 30, 2011]
[Man of the House: And So it Begins]
—Photo by aaron13251/Flickr
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About Tom Matlack
Tom, this is a great comment. I’ve been thinking much the same thing, that we’re putting too much emphasis on waling a straight line, on finishing university quickly, to pick a field and stick to it, etc. On the one hand it’s natural – we want out kids to do well and create something for themselves. On the other hand there’s a risk that with less emphasis on exploring and experimenting, there’s a lot of things about the world and about themselves the kids will never discover.
I’m reminded of Neil Young’s comment about “Heats of Gold” on his “Decade” compilation – “This song put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there.”
The connection here, I guess, is the desire to give out kids an “easy ride”. Again, a natural thing for parents to want. We try to provide an easy ride for our kids from a young age – and maybe we sometimes miss that while it’s easy, it may not be the most interesting or rewarding experience.
I really liked this one Tom.
While I don’t agree with doing away with AP courses because they have some real value, I do think we place too much emphasis on standardized tests.
But your overall point about college being an adventure is the most important.
The vast majority of my true college education was outside of the classroom. I graduated with a 3.3 GPA. Could I have done a little better in class? Yes. Yet I wouldn’t go back and change anything because the parties, my friends, learning to live on my own…that’s the stuff I remember from college and it’s what made it all worthwhile. That’s not to advocate the Animal House lifestyle, but I really think it’s necessary to find a balance.
When this article appeared in the Boston Globe I wrote a Comment that I see has received 13 “likes”
Here is my comment again.
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The intense nature of the competition for college admissions feeds a soul-sucking industry that feeds off parental and kids’ insecurities. The alleged much-touted Advanced Placement classes in which kids break their backs at most colleges no longer offer advanced placement, just exemption without credit. Colleges figured out that CEEB was undercutting their revenues–for the cost of an exam, a reasonably accomplished student could test out of the cost of 3 credits: no more. This doesn’t stop CEEB from calling their model sylabuses and test system “advanced placement.” All it does is create a pressure cooker for high school kids who earn no college credit for doing college work in high school.
Similarly, there is an industry of “tutors” and “advisors” who assist with college entrance essays. What conscientious parent of means is going to leave any stone unturned as long as people believe that acceptance at a tony school determines an adult life? Fact is, it’s nonsense. People change careers 6 – 8 times in their adult life, many large employers prefer state university grads over Ivy League kids because they make better trainees, and if happiness is a measure of success, then no one in their right mind thinks the most competitive schools are breeding grounds for happy people.
Finally, the warmest places in Hell are reserved for the folks in the new industry that assists high school students with getting exotic voluntarism somewhere on their records. Fees in the tens of thousands are collected so 16-year olds can dig latrines in 3rd world countries: why not donate the airline fare to any number of organizations and show up at the local soup kitchen, geriatric home, or hospital? Again, the perpetrators of this near fraud trade on parental and student insecurity, the willfully blind belief that there are college admission officers who are unaware of the scam.
I’m with Mr. Matlack: college should be an adventure, and perhaps the best way to prepare for it is to take a year off, get away from term papers, tests, and all the rest to figure out what will work for a kid and what will not. A little travel, a lot of employment, and a dash of local volunteer work will make the choice of a major far more sensible. It’s unlikely that college will close in the interim, and insofar as most college entrants are looking to begin 45-50 years of a career–what’s the damned hurry?
I was under the impression that the SAT’s were only being used by a handful of states now anyway? Isn’t there some other test that’s the new thing now?
At any rate, parents who shell out the big bucks for test prep kill me — if the test score is thing they are most concerned with regarding their child’s education, then that child (barring some innate drive to learn for the sake of learning) is doomed to fall on their face. REAL education is not about a test score, it is about comprehending and applying the things you have learned in real way. Do I care if my child does well in school and gets good grades? Sure. But I’m much more concerned with her grasp of the material and how she can generalize it to other situations outside of the classroom and outside of a test environment. All tests reveal, imo, is how people perform under pressure and their ability to regurgitate information in a cookie cutter way.
In re to AP classes, I took several in my junior and senior years at high school via Cornell University and entered college with 15 college credits. I didn’t take them because it would ‘look good’ on my transcripts, I took them because I realized early on that the first year or two of college is about building the foundation for learning in re to your major, the real learning, the actual pursuit of your interests are not able to be pursued until your 3rd and fourth years, so why not jump the line a little bit? A love of learning should be the goal, and the ability to deliver quality education rather than test scores should be the instrument through which children receive that.
And the point of all this, is that I’m sick to death of parents pressuring their children to get into a good school just so they (the parents) can have bragging rights on having a son or daughter at Harvard Med. Of the 5 people I gradutated high school with that went to Harvard, Yale and MIT…..only ONE of them didnt committ suicide within the first year. ALL of the notes cited academic and parental pressure. Stressing kids out regarding college when they’re in 5th grade is selfish, short sighted and unhealthy for the child. The only thing it will really accomplish is increasing the likelihood that you’ll bury that child before they’re 20, or that they will be so crippled by anxiety that they can’t function outside of academia.
Most of us in the South take the ACT these days. I can’t speak for the rest of the country though the people I knew from outside the South all took the ACT too (that I’m aware of). I took the ACT 3 times but never took the SAT. Even my parents took the ACT instead of the SAT. Despite this the general assumption by the media is the SAT is the ONLY test out there to get into college. But though the tests are different I’d imagine what is said here would apply to that test too (I’ll get to standardized tests in general in a minute).
We had AP classes in my high school but none of them had anything to do with college. I didn’t even know you could earn college credits in high school until I was well into college. I’d have taken a couple of them because let’s face it the first couple of years of college are pretty much the same no matter what you do unless you’re in a technical program or do something very specialized.
The whole idea about “good colleges” is overblown. Most employers aren’t really going to care if your degree came from Vanderbilt or the University of Tennessee as long as you have a decent degree that can be applied to the job. If you’re going into academia it will matter, and might matter if you’re hoping to get into a very elite job it will probably come into play (especially high-level politics–there’s a reason few presidents have gone to public universities), but for the average person it’s not going to make a big difference, as long as it’s an accredited university. Academic ratings are highly suspect to begin with as far as I’m concerned because much of it rests on subjective opinion but that’s probably another discussion.
Now, back to standardized tests. They definitely have their place in life, as they’re the best way to get a quick read on the knowledge a person has on a particular subject or subjects at a specific point in time, but their importance has been overstated in my opinion. I’ll never understand why colleges put more weight on a test you take on a specific day than what you did over a 4-year period in high school. My state of Mississippi bases its whole educational system on standardized tests. You even take them in elementary school. They have state tests now for certain high school classes you have to make a certain score on to graduate. It doesn’t matter if you have a 97 average across all your classes, if you have a bad day and screw up that test, you won’t graduate. I know that’s pretty unlikely and I imagine you can retake the test if you have to, but it’s possible. I think that’s ridiculous. I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence we’re ranked 50th out of 50 states when it comes to education or not.
I was pretty much raised to do nothing but make good grades and graduate from college, something very few people in my family have done, my parents being college dropouts themselves which I think strongly influenced that attitude. I don’t want to place blame of things in my life on other people but I don’t think it’s been the healthiest way for me to have been raised. There are other things in life to enjoy.
The nice thing about living in California, cliche though it may be, is that we are into the journey. It’s not about the end game, I tell my 15 YO it’s about living every day and enjoying it. Be a good person, do good things, but have fun today, I tell him each day as he gets out of the car. That said, he is taking AP classes, even more than is recommended at his grade level and the admin had to sign off on it. Why? Because the teachers know he’ll get bored if he’s not challenged more than the average bear. He’s also in a very rigorous private school and he’s one of the happiest kids anyone knows. Why? Because we follow his lead, something the pediatrician told me to to when he was a toddler with an advanced IQ. Will he take SAT prep classes? I don’t know. If he wants. Or not. Will he apply to the UC’s – you bet. Private colleges? Perhaps as long as they are in an urban setting which he craves. There are Ivy League legacies in my family, but who cares if it’s not the right place for him. We also tell him he can not go to college right away. Take a year, work on his clothing company that he launched last year. Have fun. Get drunk. Screw up. I really feel sorry for the kids who are pressured by their parents. Unless they are the kids who are at loose ends withOUT added challenges. It all comes out in the wash somehow, someway.
I’ve taught at the college level, worked with college-bound high school students, and worked for a few years with the College Board/AP exam system. I see all sorts of problems with using standardized tests as measurements. I am not here to mount a vigorous defense of the AP tests, SAT, etc.
However, there are some valid reasons to use a reliable standardized test as ONE of several ways to measure student learning. Again, not that it’s the BEST way, not that the tests are totally unbiased, just that it can be enormously useful for a higher education institution to have some common frame of reference for all of its applicants. Of course everyone’s son or daughter or other is unique and special and of course so much of life is unquantifiable, but to have no universal measurement would be problematic as well.
Think about how diverse the high school experience is for students all over the country, all over the world, really. Some high schools give out easy A’s, some don’t. When I was in high school, students in AP classes got a +5% bonus on their grades in AP classes. (The valedictorian had a 102% average. Hard to compete with that if your high school doesn’t give extra credit!) It’s hard to verify that an applicant really did work with homeless people or give vaccines in Africa. It’s hard to tell if the applicant really did write that fascinating personal essay. It’s important to have some way to compare apples to apples to apples. If one’s offspring was denied admission to a university and a student with much lower test scores got in, that parent just might call for MORE focus on standardized testing, not less.
What I want parents and others to question is the assumption that 18-22 is the ideal age for everyone to be an undergraduate. Realistically it is not. Going directly from high school to college is not necessarily the best path for every person. Spending a year doing something else is not “taking a year off” or “dropping out.” The “nontraditional” students I teach tend to be much better prepared and more focused on learning because they are not there just because of some strange kind of momentum.
If all those traditional extracurricular experiences/experiments are so important as rites of passage, then young people can get all those experiences just hanging out around college campuses. That would save their parents a lot of wasted money. It would save those young people a lot of stress over having to decide between doing homework and going on the nude waterslide. (Yes, autobiographical there.)
Scott I am totally with you (he says from a hotel room somewhere outside of Philly after visiting NYU and Barnard today and on the way to Penn and Swathmore tomorrow). I keep telling my daughter to travel the world, screw college. But she won’t take me seriously. I did love college myself but it had little to do with the academics, a little more to do with my athletics, and everything to do with my friends and the fun we had together. I could have done the same pretty much anywhere. And the real life lessons, when the time came, had little to do with books and a lot more to do with finding myself in work and life situations that required me to grow up. Those are going to come no matter what school you go to or when or even if you go. Funny that many of the brightest people in this country, specially technology gurus, drop out. They seem to think it is a waste of time and want to go directly to life.
You’re right. I’m in the minority among my colleagues, but I even think college-level athletes who have a chance to turn pro early should just go make a lot of money and then come back later if they want to. (Of course then the university loses a year or two of highly skilled unpaid labor, loses some advertising revenue, has to recruit sooner than expected, etc.) Millions of Americans every year go back to college after taking a break, why can’t a “student athlete”?
I can tell you an even harder sell: start part-time at a community college (where I work) and transfer later to a 4-year school. Small classes, instructors focused on teaching, most of them with PhD’s in their fields, and at half the price of even a state university. I feel for you. Cha-ching! $$$
It’s nice to be wealthy and smug, isn’t it? It’s sadly amusing to read articles written by well-off authors who suppose that their readers are rich neurotics just like they are. The trust-fund hippies and bohemian bourgeoisie can afford to talk on and on about how valuable “the journey” is. Try getting WIC and food stamps and sleeping in alleys; then you won’t be so judgmental about people who work like hell — and put a lot of pressure on themselves along the way — to get into the kind of school a degree from which virtually guarantees a modicum of financial security.
I see your point. I prefer to call myself a “trustafarian.” Sounds more exotic than “trust-fund hippie.”