There is something so peaceful about summer days, the way the days and nights blend into one another and stretch out into one week and the next. I feel myself wanting to relax, de-stress, and enjoy being a teenager.
My mother says I have taken a cue from the Twilight movies and turned into a vampire with my days and nights turned upside down because I am going to bed so late and getting up so late. But sadly, for me and many more of my peers, I cannot really afford to be lazy at all this summer. I am about to start my junior year of high school, chock full with a varsity sport, AP classes, and the dreaded SAT examination. This also means that college applications and college itself are right around the corner.
I remember how hard my sister’s junior year was for everyone, how stressed she was nightly, trying not to crack under the pressure of keeping up with school work and researching schools at the same time. Unfortunately, I think the push for doing well in all these things has become a rapidly growing part of our culture, age appropriate or not. I’m hearing of fifth and sixth graders preparing to score perfect 800s on the SAT when it counts by taking them over and over again before they really have to!
And I’m a little bit guilty of bending to the pressure myself. It was my idea to take a four-week long Princeton Review SAT course during my freshman year, even though I knew I was too young to be doing it. This summer, some of my friends have pages and pages of work with assigned deadlines they’ve been given to prepare for the AP classes they’ll begin in the fall. Excuse me? What if they want to go on vacation with their families? Hang out at the beach and veg out? Give their brains a break? Summers are supposed to be a time to have fun, not to be worried about school and things like that.
I felt the pressure to do well on the SAT well before high school even started (“For the kinds of schools you want to get into, there’s a minimum score you’re going to have to achieve” — I will not name the person who keeps telling me this), but the pressure really got bad the minute high school started.
In my ninth grade honors English class (not at my current school) we didn’t write one essay at home all year. All of our essays were timed, exactly one hour, four to five paragraphs. For me, essays are a detailed work, not something I can easily crank out in an hour if I want to brainstorm, plan, and proofread. You can imagine my frustration in that class. In middle school I took days to work on my writing. The only reason I can figure out why we were forced to write timed essays was this: to train us for the timed writing section of the SAT.
But for me, this wasn’t how an English class should be; what happened to the art of the essay? It felt like they were teaching to the test, as if the whole timed writing thing was just part of the big plan to help us do well with our future SAT score. And while it helped me write a decent essay with time constraints, I wasn’t picking up genuine writing skills. I didn’t even have time to proofread my own essays after I had cranked them out with the clock forcing me to write as fast as possible under the deadline. The whole thing made me sit back and wonder when our culture became so obsessed with teaching even ninth graders the tricks of the trade for standardized tests.
Every year in August my mom hosts the back-to-school welcome picnic for local students who are off to Yale in the fall. And every year I have overheard my mom and her friends talking about how they had it so much easier with the whole college admissions thing. Some of them even joke about how they would probably not get into those schools if they had to apply today but I think some of them might actually be serious.
I think it has to do with this whole hype you hear about making yourself into a package deal so more colleges will like you, instead of just being who you really are. And this really irks me. “Ooohhh! A chess playing hockey player, what a good thing he has going for him, that’ll get him into college!” Yes, this statement was made about my 10-year-old brother, who was six at the time, by a very college-oriented family friend.
Let’s see, what should I morph myself into to make myself an attractive package for colleges? Right now I’m a golf-playing writer. What kind of package will that make me? Kids aren’t supposed to do an activity because it will get them into college; they should do it because it’s what they love. Sadly, with college sports scholarships and just the fierce competition into getting into the “right” school, this is the kind of thing that we have to think about these days.
This summer most of my friends are doing some sort of SAT prep course and are also drowned in AP homework and summer reading. My little brother, who is going into fifth grade, has summer reading too. Not that this is so ridiculous, but these days he’d rather play baseball or watch Nickelodeon, almost anything else rather than read. When my sister Katie was a sophomore and just starting to get college brochures, I was only in seventh grade, but I remember picking up all the college brochures she was getting and reading them too. I can imagine how irritating that must have been to her.
This whole obsession with being ahead of the college game is way overrated now that I’m about to experience it myself. You do have to worry about it when the time comes. Being a kid is such a gift but for some this gift is sucked away by things like standardized tests and stress. Don’t get me wrong; I think this stuff is important. I’m concerned about doing well on my SATs, getting good grades, involving myself in enough extracurricular activities with added community service, and taking a challenging course load.
Above all I’m concerned about getting into a college that’s right for me. But I don’t think I stand alone when I say this isn’t all I’m concerned about. I want to be a kid and enjoy what’s left of my summer, the biggest of my worries being what kind of ice cream I want at the Bent Spoon in Princeton. And I hope my peers and even younger students feel the exact same way.
The Suburban Teen has a blog! Check it out at www.stevensonschool.org and click on the tab “Meet Our Upper School Students.”
