Hard-charging high schools urge students to do less....9 course days

They are beginning to acknowledge that the culture of excellence can have a dark side.


http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0321/p01s02-ussc.html

WINNETKA, ILL. – Sprawling across two huge campuses in Chicago's affluent northern suburbs, the venerable New Trier High School is usually cited as the epitome of public-school excellence. Nearly 95 percent of its graduates go on to four-year colleges. Its courses cover marine biology and music theory, international relations and advanced Japanese. It boasts alums like Donald Rumsfeld, Liz Phair, Charlton Heston, and a Nobel Prize-winning physicist.
But lately the talk here has centered on a problem many schools would envy: how to tone down students' intensity.

New Trier, like a number of large, high-performing schools, is beginning to acknowledge that a culture of excellence can have a dark side, and that the push to craft gilded college applications can bring on stress and overscheduling. Now the school - considered a stalwart of traditional education - is rethinking everything from its schedule to class rank and weighted GPAs in an effort to alleviate pressure.

The proposals have caused a firestorm of debate in the community, but New Trier is hardly alone in beginning to consider stress along with test scores. These days, a number of powerhouses are changing their rhetoric to preach the value of sleep, family time, relaxation, and less homework.

"It's a big nut to crack," says Scott Laurence, principal of the prestigious Palo Alto High School in California. "The kids here are amazing - they're doing internships at NASA, they're on national travel teams for athletics.... But on the other side, it creates stress, and pressure, and self-destructive behavior - body-image issues and lack of sleep and drinking.... It's really difficult to find what the right balance is for each individual kid."

<snip>


If she had to take a free period, says sophomore Melissa Birkhold, she couldn't take chamber orchestra next year. She already plays bassoon in concert orchestra and the wind ensemble, and aspires to be a professional musician. By senior year, she'd like to be taking four music classes.

"I think it's a good idea that the administration cares and wants to make our lives better," Melissa says, waiting for the bus after school. "But they're trying to cut out some of the arts classes, and they don't understand that that's what makes life fun.... I don't think they should tell me I have to take both lunch and a free period."

Love of booze causes drinking.

I have less than total sympathy for those kids. You shou7ld see the parking lot there.

a bunch of white kids all stressed out because they have way too much money, are expected to make reasonable to high grades to get into college, and they aren't getting enough sleep. Abso-fucking-lutely..........give the poor darlings less homework. <sarcasm off>

Left of Cool

but i would also point out the lack of correlation between money and a good school...all that marine biology and japanese and such was all provided for free...so why cant those inner city schools do it?

In others, it's the kids.

My school was hardly inner city, at least 95% white, under 5% black, 0% Latino or Asian. No AP courses. Even the "smart" sections had trouble reading Hemingway--we wound up reading "Old Man & the Sea" out loud in 11th grade English. Not one peep from the parents, and kids didn't sign up for college-track courses--so almost every one was cancelled. Funding wasn't an issue, and the teachers were already on staff; but there was absolutely no interest. We were all working class. My senior year was cancelled, apart from senior English, so I was allowed to take college classes and "transfer" courses back to satisfy my senior English requirement.

15 years later the economic base of the community shifted so it was a middle-class bedroom community; lots of new houses were built, new families moved in. The school was more diverse, racially. They now they had a full 5 years of French and Latin; AP calculus, chemistry, biology, English, languages. The parents demanded the courses, the school offered them, kids signed up for them.

they aren't expected to make "reasonable to high grades..."- for many of them, high grades are expected and required(by the parents). Plus- like the article says- they go overboard on the extra-curriculars...then there's SAT study classes...and the part-time job- all at a formative stage of life where it's recently been learned that more sleep is better.
plus- since those kids are smart- they have a pretty good realization about what's going on in the world they are looking to be joining soon.

some of them ARE very stressed out.

We have six, our district doesn't seem to give a shit. I live less than two hours from New Trier, too.

"It boasts alums like Donald Rumsfeld, Liz Phair, Charlton Heston, and a Nobel Prize-winning physicist."

What's shocking about this you say? That we live in a society where people know who Liz Phair and Charlton Heston are but are so unlikely to know who a Nobel Prize-winning physicist is that they don't even bother to give the name...