Vicki Abeles wrote the following piece for the Sunday NYT:
I agree wth the premise of finding balance between school work and other activities. I suspect that as long as competitive colleges demand a large number of AP classes and ECs then their is little motivation to get out of the rat race.
I have done a lot of volunteering with low-income/disadvantaged youth at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale in three separate cities, and I can confidently say that NO, these things are not confined to the elite in urban and suburban areas. I was surprised myself, but the low-income kids are often JUST as stressed out as their wealthy peers. In fact, sometimes they are more stressed out, because they know they need significant financial aid to attend college and they are trying to apply to a spread of schools to get that, plus they often have work and family responsibilities their wealthier peers don’t have (working to help support the family or caring for younger siblings while their parents work two and three jobs a piece). I honestly spend some of my volunteering time just calming them down and reassuring them that it’ll work out okay even if they aren’t perfect.
And it doesn’t end in college, either…these kids spend 12 years trying to be perfect. They don’t lose it once they reach the Promised Land of an elite college. My undergrads were as stressed out, anxious and competitive as they were in high school. I had to talk some of them into dropping classes, being okay with getting a B and stepping down from leadership positions in too many organizations. While I was a hall director I had between 15 and 20 resident assistants, and every single one of them spent at least one of our one-on-one meetings breaking down crying or stressing about something related to their copious responsibilities. But the suggestion that they drop something was brand new information to them - and sometimes, anathema.
I found this interesting. I served as a TA or an instructor for a couple of undergrad classes when I was a PhD student, and I also supervised resident assistants as a hall director. One of the consistent things I learned is that sometimes, my undergrads seemed to have no common sense. And - lol - it wasn’t that they weren’t intelligent (they were super smart and very talented!) or even that they didn’t have the common sense. It was that…oddly, they never seemed to have been encouraged to use it. They were often looking to me to tell them exactly what to do, particularly in difficult situations. (My RAs, of course, were much better at this over time with experience.) I remember one student trying to argue with me that she was right about a specific part of a question on an exam (she wasn’t) that was worth only one point. After explaining to her about 3 times why the question was incorrect, I also said “…and honestly, it doesn’t even matter. It’s only one point. Statistically, it’s not even going to affect your grade on this exam, much less in the class.” Her response? “So? It’s one point! It’s still something!”
The best part is that this was a statistics class.
Or they were great at memorizing and regurgitating information but needed some help with the critical thinking side. One exam I administered in a class had two parts to it - a memorization of facts-type part and one that required them to engage critically with what they were learning and generate some independent thoughts. I was astonished with the level of memorization they were able to achieve for the first part. I was equally astonished with how difficult it was for many of them to respond to the critical thinking part. Some of them had a really difficult time coming up with their own opinions for the essay. Or I remember helping students with research papers, and meeting with them individually and repeating over and over that while the facts they have are really great, they were giving me a summary of research articles when I really wanted a synthesis. I’d explain to them that I wanted to hear their (educated) opinion of the research they were reading - what did they think? was it plausible, believable? Why? Inevitably their eyes would go big, and I actually had many of them say to me “You want to know what I think? For real?”
They spend so much time preparing for standardized tests and not enough time thinking critically, but I don’t blame them. It’s the system that tests them to death.