<p>I really hate when teachers say things like that. How is school a team at all? Aren't we put in school to compete with each other? To see who gets the highest GPA, who gets the highest SAT, who gets elected class president, who gets elected club president, who makes the varsity team? So how are we a team if we're all competing with each other? It's just a cheesy lie.</p>
<p>At the same time, you can help the people around you (e.g. you help me with math, I help you with English) and learn valuable lessons from those around you. You get a lot of your soft skills by interacting with you classmates. Also, I found that the competition within my school allowed us to all push beyond our comfort zones and achieve more, so in a way, by competing, we are helping each other as well.</p>
<p>True but it’s just frustrating when it seems like teachers don’t even acknowledge the competition.</p>
<p>They do acknowledge it…
Just to motivate us to do what I view as pointless work! And using getting a good spot in college / outcompeting other students in the school for that spot as their “leverage!”</p>
<p>As for my classmates–none of them were my actual teammates in Science Olympiad or Mathletes. That’s one reason I am into the lower classes over my own, so the school overall is a team, but not my classmates.–But I do wish there was less competition amongst classmates and more focus on attacking other schools in Science or other subjects rather than loading up on APs against each other instead!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No…you’re put in school to learn.
Of course there has to be competition on some level, but that’s not why you’re there and it shouldn’t be the main focus of your high school experience. We should be trying to maximize the number of successful people, not creating an unnecessarily cutthroat atmosphere where only a few can succeed.</p>
<p>@Halc: I was with you till that last sentence. We shouldn’t be trying to maximize anything…we also shouldn’t be sabotaging and trying to kill for grades, but we shouldn’t be trying to be playing kumbayah with each other.</p>
<p>@OP Think of it like reality tv shows like Survivor. You make alliances to help you get to the end. (you don’t have to align with everyone obviously but…)</p>
<p>I meant “we as a society,” not “we as high school students.”
But why shouldn’t people try to help each other as much as possible?</p>
<p>I don’t know, I’ve never felt like I was competing with my classmates. Then again, all my classmates are in the same group of ~30 IB students, so we’re a reasonably tight group. I’m always happy to help other people with their work, as long as it doesn’t prevent me from doing mine (which it really never does). I know no one in the top 5 students (myself included at #2) is really that competitive about their GPAs/rank, either, so a high level of competition is not necessarily present at every school.</p>
<p>High school students aren’t put together just to compete. However, I wouldn’t necessarily think of everyone in my school as a team either. As far as I’m concerned, we share a school because it’s the most efficient way to teach lots of young people. I don’t think we necessarily have an obligation to help or compete with anyone (though helping people would be nice, of course).</p>
<p>I can tell you’re Fun at parties… Honestly I have more respect for the intelligent slackers than the hardworking students because they tend to have the team mentality as opposed to the competition mentality.</p>
<p>Frankly, the upper-level classes at my school is about as cutthroat as it gets, especially in our IB Programme, where there’s only 5 of us. If it’s me or my best friend, it’s me, plain and simple. Maybe that’s bad, but I highly doubt I’ll see any of these people in ten years, and remember only a select few names. Now, none of us sabotage. We just say we don’t know the answer when we do, but we don’t give the wrong answer. As far as we’re concerned, there’s omitting knowledge, and then there’s lying, and the latter is way worse than the former.</p>