-
6. Competitive Classmates at Elite Charter High
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
89 6 Competitive Classmates at Elite Charter High Many students at Elite Charter High believe that they can have a happy, balanced teenage life or straight As, but not both. They are under extreme pressure to achieve high academic success, and they worry that attaining straight As might require them to sacrifice their emotional and mental sanity. Jenny, whom we met in chapter 5, derides her schoolmates’ emotional investment in perfect grades: “A lot of people really stress out and are, like, ‘I can’t believe I got an 89! I’m never ever going to Harvard now!’ And kids start crying and stuff. And I’m, like, ‘Oh, my gosh. Move on with your life. Go take a walk or something’ [she laughs].” Although he is less sardonic, Mr. Fischer echoes her concern: “[Students say,] ‘Am I going to get into a good school? What do I have to do to get into a good school? I can’t get a B. If I get a B, I won’t get into a good school. If I get a C, I won’t get into a school, period.’ That mindset has been pounded into kids.” He seems genuinely troubled by this attitude. In our 2012 interview, he tells me that in the year after I completed my fieldwork in his classroom he conducted “a study on stress for AP students” as part of his master’s degree research. “They sign up for six AP classes [per year]. They think that’s what they need to do to get into college. And they are so upset because they can’t juggle it all. And they are really succeeding , but they have no idea that they are.” Although Jenny ridicules students who feel devastated when they do not get As, we know that she herself would very much like to have perfect grades (see chapter 5). Still, she asserts, “An A isn’t worth giving up your entire life to,” expressing an idea that I often heard from students at the school who do not get straight As. According to Jenny, “if you really, like, went really, really, extraordinarily and almost crazy far, you could probably get an A. But if somebody wants to stay just a normal human being, [if that person] just don’t like that subject, or 90 DEFINING STUDENT SUCCESS that’s just not really hitting home with them, then maybe not. They won’t get an A and will get a B-plus or something.” In other words, students at Elite Charter High are concerned that initiative can be taken too far: that the pursuit of success can take an unhealthy toll. I did not note this concern at either of the other two schools I studied. At Alternative High, there is no such thing as trying too hard. Instead, students are concerned about the link between failure and lack of effort, which gives rise to the smart-but-not-trying identity story. Alternative High’s cheater story and Comprehensive High’s trained dog story embody students’ concerns about fraudulent or illegitimate success. But at Elite Charter High there is no similar identity story. Students here are not worried about people who cheat to pass a class. Likewise, the Average Joe story does not exist here because being average is an insult. Rather, students’ anxieties center on achieving perfect grades in honors and AP classes, something that requires high intelligence and initiative. The OCD Overachiever Identity Story Kevin tells me, “People who try too hard end up becoming, like, OCD.” Many AP students at Elite Charter High use this term to refer to students who exert enormous effort to earn excellent grades. OCD is an acronym for obsessive-compulsive disorder, the clinical name of a psychiatric disorder in which a person has obsessive thoughts and impulses. A person who suffers from OCD feels compelled to enact rituals and behaviors in order to stave off some dreaded situation. However , students here use the term less precisely to emphasize the extreme, seemingly obsessive commitment to schoolwork that is required for perfect grades. The term’s widespread use at Elite Charter High is a way to link extreme school success with abnormality, a connection that makes sense to students such as Jenny and Ryan, who are envious of and frustrated by classmates who are more academically successful than they are. Kevin describes an OCD overachiever at his school: “It seems kind of crazy. I know people who, like...