Tag: School

Coping with High School

Posted on by andrew

Alexandra Dadivas (she/her/hers), Low Entropy Volunteer Writer

 

Adults often say that your years in high school are going to be the best years of your life. While in the end that might be true, it doesn’t mean that your whole time there will be full of sunshine and rainbows. Let’s be real – high school is hard. The constant juggling between maintaining your grades, keeping up with your social life and taking care of your mental health is bound to be straining for anyone experiencing it. As a person who is going through secondary school myself, I also had to learn the hard way of accepting the adventure and the struggles that come with it.

 

Growing up, we are always told of the importance of education. How it will take us far in life, should we succeed. But succeeding in high school is much easier said than done. Unlike elementary, secondary school is a place where you have to take care of yourself. Your teachers are not going to constantly check on you to see if you’re following along, there will be no designated studying times and you cannot simply disregard a class, for there will be consequences both then and in the long run. If, or rather, when, you find yourself in a subject where you are struggling to keep up with the relentless pace, it is your job to consult your teacher about it. If you have a big test coming up, it’s up to you to take the initiative and to make time to study for it efficiently. You must train yourself to focus in every single class, despite how uninteresting they may be. If you want to maintain your grades, you are the one who has to take the necessary actions to do that, because no one else will do it for you. The process of it may seem cruel and draining at first, but your accomplishments later on are going to feel so much sweeter, knowing that you achieved them all by yourself.

 

High school is where you will live out most of your teenage years. Me being a teenager, I can easily say that having a social life is one of the top priorities on a teen’s mind. We want to have fun, to make friends and explore the world with them. With its demanding schedule, school can definitely get in the way of that. Spending eight hours a day inside a cramped building and then spending the rest of your time vigorously studying leaves little wiggle room for you to do the things you want to do – the things you saw teenagers doing in movies. You may not be able to go to the beach or go shopping or go for midnight drives with your friends as much as you’d like, but it is not impossible to make lifelong friendships in just the simple setting of a classroom. While bonding over the difficulties of trigonometry may not seem ideal, it is those random surprise connections that make each class worthwhile.

 

High school is known for its mental strain. Every year, we are pushed to a breaking point. Grades drop, relationships are broken and we lose pieces of ourselves. Life comes at us wave after wave and we try so hard to stay afloat, but we just cannot seem to take a breath. It is terrifying. Unfortunately, this is an issue where even I could use some guidance, so I will only speak from experience and of what has helped me in the past. My advice is to find a tether. Find something that you can always rely on to bring you back. Find something that will keep you grounded, even when it feels like you have lost your footing. For me, my tether was reading. When reality became too much for me, I would escape into the worlds given to me through literature, and it would clear my head. Your tether does not have to be limited to a hobby like mine, though. It can be a person. These days, mental health is something that is much more openly discussed. Talk to someone. Someone you fully trust, because in all this mess of variables, you deserve a person who presents themselves as a constant. Be it a best friend or a parent, pick someone who will give you the warmth of their hugs and both of their shoulders to cry on. Your mind has been through many things, and you owe it to yourself to take care of it.

 

High school is a scary place. It is a maze that twists and turns and pulls the ground out from under you at any given time. It changes you, but you need to know that that is okay. You are supposed to change. You are supposed to make mistakes. You are supposed to shed your skin and grow into the person that you have been working so hard to become. You may not have taken the paths that you thought you were going to take, but you are still on a path. Granted, it is a wild one, but I have learned to embrace every second of it, and I hope you do too.

 

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Hi! My name is Alexandra Dadivas and I’m going into Grade 11 with the goal of being in healthcare sciences. Avid reader of young adult fiction!

Off the College Track

Posted on by andrew

Low Entropy Volunteer Writer Sejin Ahn offers a glimpse of the South Korean high school system, and argues for a more flexible approach in our attempts to maximize the potential of young minds.

 

As a Korean who spent 18 years in South Korea, I often saw students having hard times in high school. Being unable to adapt to life in high school often leads many young, beautiful souls to the edge of a cliff. Why does this happen? How can we solve this problem?

 

Every country across the world has its own educational system, and they all place value in different areas. South Korea’s educational system tends to focus too much on academic performance, leaving anything else they should learn at that age behind.

 

A high school is a place that is supposed to provide students with various opportunities to explore themselves. They deserve to learn how to socialize with others and experience many things. But unfortunately, in South Korea, the percentage of students who are admitted to colleges is considered the highest priority. Going to a university is treated as the first gate to winning at life. Otherwise, you will be a loser who failed to pass this basic level of achievement. Due to this social atmosphere, most Korean students feel enormous pressure, increasing undesirable and unhealthy competition between them. This increased competition fails to support students in widening their horizons and gaining new perspectives.

 

I remember when I was a high school student, I got career counseling with teachers. Most high schools in South Korea do this in the name of helping students find out what they are interested in and support their careers. However, all they talked about during the counseling was going to a university. If students said they wanted to have other experiences instead of going to a university, teachers kept pressuring them until they changed their minds.

 

I was no exception. I was a student who had interests in various fields, including photography, writing, composition, etc. The common ground among them was that they were not profitable fields. So when I talked about my dreams and asked teachers for their advice on what I should do, what they said was, “Okay, you can take a photo, write a novel and compose a song, but leave them just as your hobby.”

 

This harsh reality led to some hard times for me. I was confused due to conflicts between what I was interested in and what high school taught. One question came up in my head was, “What should I live for?”

 

Even students who wish to go to college to study a specific field are often not taught by high schools how to shape their future and avoid losing interest and passion. One of my high school friends wanted to declare a major in history at a college, but she was treated like a student who was ignorant of reality by teachers because, compared to other fields, what she wanted to pursue was an area that was not widely recognized by the public and not an easy one in which to make money. Individuals’ strengths, desires, dreams and aspirations always come second.

 

Time spent at high school is critical because it is often when people start forming their self-identities and preparing to step forward to the broader world as a grown member of society. In this sense, the absence of diverse options makes many people confused about who they really are and the direction they should be heading.

 

Not every student can be treated the same way. Not having excellent academic performance does not mean you are a problematic person. Not going to college does not mean you are a loser. Choosing your passion and interests does not mean your life is going to be miserable. High school is just the beginning of your life, which consists of thousands of chapters you can fill in by yourself. As institutions that take care of teens standing just right in front of the door to the world, high schools need to let students know that there are various ways of living a life, rather than showing only limited options.

 

If you’re in high school, what are your hopes and dreams? And if you’re not, what kind of advice would you give your high school self? Let us know in the comments below, or on any of our social media channels!