Read the following article and respond to the prompt:
What Role Does Stress Play in Your Life?
School resumes today for many students after the holiday break. If you are one of them, do you feel rested and ready to return to classes, studying and all your other activities?
Or do you feel some degree of stress and/or anxiety as you get back into the swing of things? And if so, how common do you think it is for teenagers to feel that way?
In the Opinion essay “Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?” Vicki Abeles writes:
Respond to the following question:Stuart Slavin, a pediatrician and professor at the St. Louis University School of Medicine, knows something about the impact of stress. After uncovering alarming rates of anxiety and depression among his medical students, Dr. Slavin and his colleagues remade the program: implementing pass/fail grading in introductory classes, instituting a half-day off every other week, and creating small learning groups to strengthen connections among students. Over the course of six years, the students’ rates of depression and anxiety dropped considerably.But even Dr. Slavin seemed unprepared for the results of testing he did in cooperation with Irvington High School in Fremont, Calif., a once-working-class city that is increasingly in Silicon Valley’s orbit. He had anonymously surveyed two-thirds of Irvington’s 2,100 students last spring, using two standard measures, the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. The results were stunning: 54 percent of students showed moderate to severe symptoms of depression. More alarming, 80 percent suffered moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety.“This is so far beyond what you would typically see in an adolescent population,” he told the school’s faculty at a meeting just before the fall semester began. “It’s unprecedented.” Worse, those alarming figures were probably an underestimation; some students had missed the survey while taking Advanced Placement exams.What Dr. Slavin saw at Irvington is a microcosm of a nationwide epidemic of school-related stress. We think of this as a problem only of the urban and suburban elite, but in traveling the country to report on this issue, I have seen that this stress has a powerful effect on children across the socioeconomic spectrum.Expectations surrounding education have spun out of control. On top of a seven-hour school day, our kids march through hours of nightly homework, daily sports practices and band rehearsals, and weekend-consuming assignments and tournaments. Each activity is seen as a step on the ladder to a top college, an enviable job and a successful life. Children living in poverty who aspire to college face the same daunting admissions arms race, as well as the burden of competing for scholarships, with less support than their privileged peers. Even those not bound for college are ground down by the constant measurement in schools under pressure to push through mountains of rote, impersonal material as early as preschool.Yet instead of empowering them to thrive, this drive for success is eroding children’s health and undermining their potential. Modern education is actually making them sick.
What, if anything, makes being an adolescent today more potentially stress-inducing than, say, in your parents’ and grandparents’ generations? Explain.
All of the work that we have and the high expectation that people have for us can put a lot of stress on us. Like it said in the article, " the drive for success is eroding children's health and undermining their potential. Modern education is actually making them sick." This is true because form all the work and the long hour we have at school it's causing us a lot of stress and lack of sleep.
ReplyDeleteBeing the youngest in my family usually sets high expectations from me, yet I suffered probably the most. I watched and felt each heartbreak when someone I loved passed away from me, but I'm supposed to be strong??? Everyone tells me I need to be strong to stay focus but how can a person do that? I never get time for myself. I barely even have time to sleep most nights, I always have 30 things on my mind at once. I think me not getting be weak for once stresses me out the most. Because now I have all this built up emotion and I have to force that on to the back burner of my head. But it's almost as if I hear it whenever I try to focus. I always have to bundle things up and keep it together. When someone ask me "school is stressful?" I reply and state "no life is" because it's not just school. School is what guides us through life and if I'm not always the best at it where will I end up? What college would I go to? What is my life going to look like in a few years? And if I'm 88 and dying would I be sastfifed with the life I lived? I want to make my life count and remember it for things I loved not forced into loving or always remembering how stressed out I was
ReplyDeletei feel like in my generation people or atleast my family expect a lot from kids, they think that if we don't stay on track we will never achieve our goal, they put a lot of pressure on me to do the right thing to stay on track and honestly i don't think there was that kind of pressure on my parents or grandparents. but i do understand there point, they want me to lead a good life so i don't mind them setting high expectations from me
ReplyDeleteI am stressed because during the school year I didn't do what I had to do and failed and go to summer school for 8 to 5.
ReplyDeleteAt most times I am not stressed because there are things that are my fault being in summer school my fault so I can't stress over it knowing that this summer school position was not given as punishment but I earned it as punishment but as the youngest and have my sister be a good student ahead of me I'm always told why aren't you like her what does that do teing me that it pretty ugh makes me flustered but it's okay I'll move on stress less
ReplyDelete- Moses
All of the work we get that's piled on top of each other becomes too much for us and it pressures me to get it all completed in time
ReplyDeleteI was stressed when i had to work so many days and also try to do all my work for school, it was very hard because i would be so tired & then i had my family talking to me about school all the time and it was so much pressure about stuff that i knew i had messed up and things i knew i shouldve done.
ReplyDeleteIm stressed out because of all work that piles up and the due dates that are so close together it makes it hard to get everything done
ReplyDeleteIm stressed because most of the hw i get or important projects
ReplyDeleteIm stressed because i always had a laziness problem and the more work i see that i have to do the more lazy i get and i get a headache
ReplyDeleteI'm not stressed most of the time , only because in order to be stressed you would have to be working hard non stop. In my case that's not what I've been doing. Since I've been pushing certain works to the side and hoping magically it would be get done I have no stress on me. Unless I procrastinate long enough to the point where I have a lot of work due at once , that's when I'll become stressed out.
ReplyDeleteBeing the only girl amongst my siblings, it becomes very stressful as far as keeping the house in tact. The pressure for me to be that honor student I was in middle school is also very stressful because high school is a totally different ball game as opposed to middle school. I become frustrated easily when I'm overwhelmed by work or someone's actions which causes me to stress. I'm personally way too young to stress the way I do.
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