Paly student tells of school stress

I went to Homestead High School (and have friends that went to Gunn/Paly) and the experiences I've witnessed have been similar.

One of my friends has parents that worked at Adobe. During his junior year, he was taking AP Calculus BC, AP Physics C E&M, AP Physics C Mechanics and AP Computer Science. He got straight A's both semesters, and got a 5 on all of the AP tests. I went over to his house during the summer and found that there was a huge hole on the bottom of the door in his room. He told me it was because his mom was so angry at him for something school related (something trivial like getting only a 2100 on the SAT) that she kicked the door in.

Another one of my friends' dad works at Intel. My friend ended up getting accepted into UC Davis (but rejected from UCLA/Berkeley/MIT), and, while I was in the room, his dad told him that UC Davis is for failures.

This problem has little to do with the schools themselves. It has to do with the parents, and the reason why people come to live here in the Silicon Valley. People don't move here to live a great life, settle down and have kids. They come here to advance their career, and ultimately, to make money. Here in the valley, if you don't have marketable skills, you are trash. And the kids who grow up here know that all too well.

Education in Asia, especially the main cities in the developed nations (Shanghai, Singapore, Seoul etc. ) is pretty much exactly the same. There's many purposes to an education, manifest and overt ones. For example, keeping youths neatly congregated and managed in singular locations, socialisation into specific social archetypes of value etc. We may say that an education is about Finding Your Passion and Being An Educated Person or to Engage Civil Society. But that's pretty much just what we're saying. Tax dollars are the votes at hand, and capitalist society really doesn't value An Education over a populace well-educated to obtain economically-productive jobs that produce tangible wealth.

We want to reverse this trend (overly competitive schooling systems) as much as we want to value philosophers and humanities scholars and artists. Enough to say it, but not quite enough to pour copious amounts of money into it. As students we're told to shoot for the sky. Study harder. Get straighter As. That's best for (capitalist) society. Every human resource neatly and fully expended. Maybe things will change when the data illustrates how people who like their jobs or areas of study are more productive. But that's a big if. The status quo seems easier.

I went to Ithaca High School in upstate New York which I think got this right, at least more right than a lot of other places. The freshman and sophomore classes were like Carolyn describes in that they had lots of homework and I felt very overwhelmed. However as I got in to the higher level classes homework became optional. Most people don't believe this but I actually had an AP Calculus course with 100% optional homework, I didn't do a single assignment the whole year. The reason our teachers gave for this was that it was teaching us manage our learning, something that would become crucial next year in college. Of course, this puts a huge emphasis on the test since it's almost 100% of your grade, which is stressful too. But that felt a lot more fair to me. Our teacher gave us concepts that he was expecting us to have mastered by test time, great lectures on those concepts and homework containing problems which were similar to what we'd face on the test. The rest was up to us.

In my opinion this system really works, I was already a strong math student coming in but this class solidified my love of it and I wound up majoring in Math. People have a certain cynicism about topics like this, because on some level it's a zero sum game. Everyone wants to be above average but that's clearly not possible. I don't think you can completely remove this stress, nor should we want to, it wouldn't be preparing you for life if we did. But we can substantially reduce it with different teaching methods and I fail to understand why these teaching methods are beyond considering for most high schools.

I pretty much coasted through H.S. ... There was pressure, but I mostly ignored it and did what I wanted. Depending on how much of my grade in a given class was testing vs. homework, which I rarely did, I would get an A/B usually. I played varsity football two years, band a year and jr rotc for three.

In the end, I didn't go to college, straight out of H.S. or later. I spent a couple years doing artwork, and BBSing got me into graphics design. I fell into programming, and now 22 years out of high school, I work as a very senior software developer. I've dabbled in management and didn't like it. All of that said, you don't necessarily need to overly stress out in H.S. if you are smart and some level of self motivation towards something that works as a career.

I'm just anecdotal evidence and probably more the exception to the rule. I never quite understood the level of stress that some teenagers seem to feel. It always seemed to me it didn't take that much work to do well enough academicly, and unless you're trying for a top school with a full scholarship, there are lots of options.

There was an essay sent from student to student around finals every year at my university. It reminded us that success takes many paths. It reminded us that for some, this may not be their path, and that was okay.

Success isn't about getting straight A's. It's about finding what you love and being the best you can be at it. Ignore the toxic culture and find yourself.

This article seems to blame teachers as needing more "punishments" and using large homework workloads to teach material because they cannot. I graduated from Gunn (the other PAUSD high school) in 2013 and it was definitely a time I remember as a very happy and excited time of my life. I had excellent teachers, especially in Math/Science/CS, who really connected with students and got us excited about learning difficult topics past the point that would be expected from a public high school. The workload was quite manageable, even with multiple AP classes, and I always got my 8 hours of sleep. Most students I knew never really personally felt the level of stress that is so publicized online.

Perhaps my experience is different from the ones posted online because I had parents that, both because our aspirations were aligned and because they were always very supportive, let me choose what choose what I wanted to focus on in school and after school. Perhaps its because I took mostly 'advanced' classes, where teachers are more likely to focus their attention, and did well in them without expending an unhealthy amount of effort. Perhaps me and others who enjoyed Gunn were just lucky, but I have a sneaking suspicion that these articles are written because they are easy: the alarmist pieces repeat what's been said before and always end up quickly becoming hugely popular.

I just wanted to make that the takeaway is not that the teachers are unqualified or need to be reprimanded; the teachers at Gunn are excellent and very much appreciated.

Context: cluster of suicides in Palo Alto schools

Recent article in the Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sili...

An article from Vice in September:

http://www.vice.com/read/student-teaching-0000748-v22n9

NPR interview with a student from May:

http://www.npr.org/2015/05/10/405694832/in-palo-altos-high-p...

SF Magazine article in May:

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Why-are-Palo-Alto-s-ki...

I don't want my kids to grow up in the Bay Area, period. I'll probably move to Europe when I have them. Sure, that means some career sacrifice (and wages) but it doesn't matter, I don't want them to grow in such an environment.

Yes! This article will make a great addition to her college application!

(Joking aside, this is literally the mentality a school system like this encourages)

I'm five years out from this and still remember the stress. Students are now asked to give up their present for a chance at a good future.

The kids bust their asses, all day and late into the night, and it's still not good enough. They watch their peers get the top grades, top scores, and top admissions.

The parents bust their asses at startups, working late and weekends in their tiny rental, and it's not enough. They watch others their age and younger striking it rich with their acquisitions and IPOs.

(of course, both are doing just fine, and amazingly well compared to the rest of the world. But the toxic mentality remains)

Suggested solution: round up all grades above 95% to 100%. Re-practicing the same material 100 times because you only score perfectly on the practice tests 9 times out of 10 (meaning, 1 time out of 10 you get 98%) is an incredibly inefficient use of time. Let people get 95% in each of their classes and if they still want to overachieve, let them take an additional class. That's still HARD but at least it's not so wasteful.

Similarly, what about university admissions "capping" the number of extracurriculars etc. they consider? Okay, you've already got your 4.0, you're already in a sport, you already play violin. It's great that you also have three other activities, but we're just going to add until we get you to 100% and stop counting. Enough with the wars between 140% and 150% overachievement.

You get what you measure. If it requires a perfect SAT score to get into Harvard, then people are going to take hundreds of hours from their young life that could be better spent learning something else or having a slightly balanced life and instead spend it studying and re-studying the SAT. It also unreasonably biases entrance against students who needed to work a little bit rather than study 24/7.

At some point when you're measuring the top 1% the margin of error becomes greater than the precision of the measurement. The real problem, as has been discussed elsewhere, is that the brand name schools haven't grown to accommodate as large of a population (by percentage) as they did in the past, to the point that they reject thousands and thousands of students who would have been accepted eagerly 50 years ago. In school and in life there seem to be fewer and fewer positions near the top, that provide lifestyles that seemed attainable not that long ago, given hard work.

from anyone out there feeling the pressure - i did only well enough in highschool to get into a halfway decent college (good public school), and then graduated there with a 2.0 out of guilt of wasting my parents' money. i literally had the minimum required GPA to graduate - not a coincidence. i'm not saying you should do this, but it's what happened, and those were the choices i made at that (very) young age.

i'm doing just fine. people end up all over the map and it usually has very little to do with what they did in school. i know academic overachievers who never got anywhere in life, and total slackers who found their niche a few years later. my co-founder is a drop-out, not because of grand ambitions but because he just said 'fuck this' a few months into it.

the trick is to find something to do something well (and do well in), it doesn't have to be school. it doesn't even have to be making money

(and if you follow the logic when rationalizing over-pressuring kids in school, it always goes back to money. always.)

About the time I was doing my GCSEs (16 yrs), Oblivion was released. Revision wasn't a priority when Tamriel was in danger. I'm still glad I spent my time playing Morrowind and Oblivion rather than spend my evenings overanalysing English literature.

On a more serious note, tne thing that surprised me about doing a PhD and attending undergrad classes* was that without the pressure of exams and homework, I listened and was interested. Far more interested than I was at undergrad when each hour was spent scribbling down notes.

*My undergrad was in physics, my PhD is in computer vision which I knew absolutely nothing about when I started.

Coming from a high school that is usually considered one of the top 10 in my random European country, I simply cannot imagine this. Granted, this country is one of the cyan countries in [1]. High school was easily the most fun time of my childhood.

I feel incredibly lucky now. I'd never want to expose my child to an environment like this.

[1] http://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/sxn.png

Competition is a choice. Some say it's for losers[1].

Either way, this is melodrama. Certain goals really do require sacrifices. But everyone choses their own personal goals. I do remember being a teenager, and I do remember that it was difficult to realize this. That doesn't make it any less true.

[1] WSJ, "Competition is for Losers" http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-l...

Oh dear US citiziens...as a European reading things like this is hilarious. Here it doesn't matter what High School you attend, you go to any university you want because basically everyone is free and with no need to apply. Nobody ever asked me about my HS Diploma or my university grades. In the end the only thing that matters is what you can do/know (global truth).

Reason #368 not to have kids. Seriously what state of mind compels people to bring new humans into the world and force them through this gauntlet? I remember being a teenager and the experience sounds even worse today. I think most unborn babies would just not consent to birth if they knew this was ahead of them.

I find this deeply disturbing, particularly because there has never been a better time in recent history to NOT give a damn about how you perform in traditional school systems, if you are unlucky or ignorant enough to be imprisoned in one in the first place. Competitive anxiety is one thing when it compels people to achieve amazing things, and another entirely when it clouds judgment and makes people miserable and on edge so they can merely out-compete the next person, even if the entire competition is largely just a contrived and futile ego game to begin with. People should first think long and hard about why they are striving for whatever it is they are stressing over.

But the truly disturbing thing is that traditional schools still exist, and a frightening number of people -- even some smart people! -- still consider the system humane and somehow necessary. I sometimes can't believe that my younger self was effectively forced to do push-ups, run laps, eat lunch in a crowded cafeteria (that is, navigate the social landscape as someone with anxiety), and memorize court cases, poems, and Greek column types because some older person decided that it was good for me. Because overall it wasn't, and the reason I managed to finish K-12 as a reasonably educated human being instead of a sheep is that I realized the contrived nature of traditional education very early -- like, second grade -- and placed actual education (and, maybe unfortunately, silly but outrageously fun MMORPGs) above “school for the sake of grades”. I learned a lot from school, and even plenty from coursework, but I can hardly imagine the superior human I might be had I been allowed to focus on my personal interests and learn at my own pace.

School is a really bad place for smart kids. It’s disgusting. For every would-be gang member or fry cook who turns out significantly better because he was forced to attend school, there are probably many thousands of bright young people who would much rather be inventing something, experimenting, productively socializing, or studying what they find interesting. If I do one meaningful thing in my life, it will be helping to make that the norm. It’s really a sad thing that some kids with plenty of potential are misguided into thinking that a GPA is more important than knowledge, experience, curiosity, and comprehension. And it’s an atrocity that staggeringly gifted young people can grow up thinking they’re poorly endowed weirdos because, instead of memorizing their way through school, they struggle to actually understand things since their minds refuse to take “that’s just how it works” for an answer, and they bother to "waste time" wondering, "What if...?"

There are far more humane ways to criminally detract from the most important years of young American lives, if that’s the goal of compulsory education.

I get what these articles are trying to imply but I'm not seeing hard figures.

Is it really worse in these locations and is it really worse than the old days?

Poor rich kids and the poor youth of today is a meme that's decades old, I need hard figures that this time it's different.

Tl;dr

Adolescence is hard.

http://25iq.com/2015/11/14/charlie-munger-ama-how-does-charl...

It's been a long time since I was in education, but it seems to be that the source of the stress is having to take endless exams. Something imposed from on high on the teachers as demonstration of their competency.

The author only briefly touched on this, but the attempted suicide rate is alarmingly high in this school district. A lot of people here are making light, but something scary is happening there.

I'll try to find a reference....

My experience through high school was very similar. From grades 9 to 11, I woke up at 6 each day to take a bus to another school to take an engineering class. I then had 7 other periods of the day, each with a 43 minute class (by 11th grade, I gave up lunch to take another class, so I had 8 consecutive periods of class), where teachers assigned ridiculous amounts of homework and made incredibly difficult tests to somehow test us.

In twelfth grade, I stopped having to wake up at six, but I then replaced that with six AP classes. Somehow, I managed to do well on all the exams, but I was always stressed, always on edge, always anxious. On top of this, I had all of those college apps, and since I was overly ambitious, I applied to like 20 schools, almost all of whom had lengthy, frustrating supplements.

Then, of course, there were the extracurriculars, all those bullshit clubs and activities I did to plaster on my college application, and the added pressure of every other honors student competing for grades, classes, research positions, internships, and leadership positions, and all the other nonsense that seemed to matter so much back then. School would feel like a pressure cooker, where the tension would just build and build without reprieve.

And then there were all the normal social pressures of high school. Were you invited to parties, or were you not? Did you drink? Did you smoke? Were you getting laid, or were you not? Who were you taking to prom/junior prom/spirit week dance/freshman dance? Were you "cool," or were you not? This dissipated a bit by senior year, as people matured, but the underlying tension was always there.

I thought that March of senior year would be my happiest moment. All my efforts, all of my sacrifices, would pay off. And they did, in a way. I got into multiple fantastic Computer Science schools.

But that joy I thought I'd feel never materialized. I'd idealized accomplishing something, of getting into a top university, so much, that the actual accomplishment could never really compare. All I really felt was emptiness, and I sinking feeling that I'd wasted a fuckload of time.

Now, here I am in college, where everything feels pretty similar. People compete over internships instead of colleges, but nothing has really shifted. The competition is just a lot harder. But, I'm a junior now in college, and I think my experience here has been much better. I've learned to finally stop giving so many fucks about everyone else, and focusing on what I want. I think its brought me better results too.

Sometimes though, I do wonder: what's the point of all of this? Why do we chase after prestige and money as if they're all-solving panaceas? And what am I going to do after I graduate, get that "amazing" job I've been striving for, and don't have any set goals to lust for? What will I do next?

Weirdly enough, high school in Palo Alto sucks for the same reason recruiting is hard.

Relevant anecdote: I had beers tonight with a friend who was going through some strange feelings about some acqui-hire interviewing with Google. (To be clear, Google's acquiring his company, not the other way around.) He's brilliant, and he's got literally a couple decades of experience in engineering, product, design, etc -- and yet he walked away not knowing why some of the team members were acqui-hired and others were a 'pass.'

So why does Google's interview process feel like the SATs, or this girl's description of high school? Perhaps our 'measurement' systems for 'human quality' are really, really bad. Probably because human 'quality' isn't really quantifiable (or even well-defined, or static under observation), definitely because there is no clean test for such things, and because intelligence is a slippery, poorly-defined quality, and definitely not a quantity.

High school is the worst example of this: it can be weirdly competitive, the stakes are irrelevant/stupid (scores on standardized tests?), and everything is scaled incorrectly.

For my own son (he's 4), I hope he just finds something he wants to do. I will be hugely proud if he figures out what makes him happy and does it. I would definitely have fun if he enjoyed building things, because that's something I enjoy, and I'd love to share it with him. But I swear I'd love him just as much if he became a lawyer. (No, HN, seriously, even a lawyer! if you have been sued and don't have kids you wouldn't understand; I've had both.)

Now, Palo Alto is a weird case, but I grew up in Mountain View (granted, a generation ago), and there was a little of the same competitiveness going on. But it wasn't institutional, it was parent-driven. Get enough like-minded parents in one spot, well, then I guess it feels like reality. But I think the central fiction of the entire affair is that grades, top colleges, some sort of context-free "achievement" is a first-order good. But it's not a filter for anything that really matters... for example: empathy, thoughtfulness, humility, etc. Or being able to create value for the world.

Or even capital-A achievement (which is only a poor proxy for value-creation). These qualities (and others) are more important for getting something done than pure intellect... if such a thing even exists, frankly -- I'm more inclined to believe in domain-specific aptitude than some sort of pure 'IQ' score, like a D&D character attribute... far too reductive to be real. Testing well on the SAT is a reliable indicator of being good at taking standardized tests... full stop.

And being good at interviews is 100% correlated with being good at interviews. I can't say much beyond that.