Title:
For Some Teens, a Busy Life Takes Fun Out of High
School
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Education Report.
See text below
Text:
For years the University of California, Los Angeles,
has done a national survey of first-year college
students. Some questions in the Freshman Survey
relate to emotional health and stress. Last year,
twenty-nine percent said they often felt
"overwhelmed" by all they had to do in their last
year of high school. That was two percentage points
higher than the year before. There was a big
difference between men and women. Almost forty
percent of women reported feeling that level of
stress, compared to just eighteen percent of men.
Deborah Stipek is dean of the School of Education at
Stanford University in California. She says a lot of
students are under too much pressure from parents
and schools. "They are not enjoying what can be the
incredible satisfaction of learning and developing
understandings and skills. Leaning can be an
adventure. But instead of an adventure, it's really
about the test, it's about the college
application."Professor Stipek recently wrote about
this issue in the journal Science. She used the
example of her own daughter in high school. Her
daughter has taken advanced placement, or AP,
courses in French to earn credit toward college. She
told her mother she would be happy to never speak
French again. Deborah Stipek says, "I think that
revealed the real basic problem, which is the AP
courses that she was taking in French were not about
learning French, not about being able to communicate
with a different culture, or to travel, or to have a
skill that could be useful in life. It was about
getting a score on an AP test that would help her
get into the college of her choice."She works with
schools to do yearly surveys of students to find out
their sources of stress and anxiety and get their
ideas for supportive policies. "We've gone into
schools where they say 'This isn't a problem.' And
then they do a survey of the students, and they are
just blown away by what they get back from the
students when the students are actually asked."In
two thousand nine, a documentary film looked at the
pressure on many students to succeed in school and
in lives busy with activities and homework. The film
is called "Race to Nowhere." Deborak Stipek -- who
was interviewed in the film -- says it shows that
many students today are not experiencing the joys of
learning. They feel under enormous pressure to
perform -- "perform," she says, "as opposed to
'learn.'" For VOA Special English, I'm Carolyn
Presutti.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
