Throughout high school there is a process, though not necessarily unintentional, of weeding people out. Only the strong, hardworking, and dedicated will become a success in life and students that take it seriously will make it far, while others will be weeded out through the process of high school itself. What is the ultimate goal? College.
At the start of high school students are thrown into a situation where they have to decide who they want to be in life. They decide, not always consciously, who they want to be as a person in their high school life. Students make this decision with the help of many smaller decisions that make up the big decision: who you are in high school. Who do you associate your self with? Do you do your work? What classes do you take? Who do you eat lunch with and walk to class with? What extra curricular activities are you a part of? These questions, and students answers to them have a big impact on who they will be as a person. This is where the weeding out begins. Students who make the right decisions to these questions will make it on to the next rung on the ladder of success, while students who make the wrong choices will be weeded out quickly. Students who will move on will be that much closer to the ultimate goal. But what happens to the students who are weeded out? They are on a much harder road now, that is hard to come back from, they are now further away from the ultimate goal then before they made their decisions.
During a students freshman year the classes are not painstakingly hard, a student may have one honors class, but nothing that requires a great deal of mental strain. How students do in these classes will be the next rung to climb. If students write these classes off as unimportant and do poorly in them then they will be weeded out, causing the pool of students competing for the ultimate goal to become a little bit smaller. But what does doing well in this classes mean? Grades. They are the main showing of how well a student is doing in class. So, to get good grades in a students freshman year sets them up to excel in the rest of their high school experience. It is hard, after all, to break bad habits, and getting bad grades in this curtail year can make it much harder to overcome the next rung in the ladder.
That next rung, or process of weeding out is finals. Finals are a do-or-die situation that can sometimes make or break a class. Finals, in my opinion are the first real pressure situation of a students high school career. Students hear scary speeches from their teachers regarding how “important it is to develop good study techniques” and scary phrases like, “twenty percent of your grade”. Both their grades and their chance of the ultimate goal begins to become a reality with the coming of their first final exams. How students prepare themselves and perform on these tests will teach them how to work well under pressure and how they will study and give effort on tests in the future. The ones who don’t work hard will again, get weeded out.
Sophomore year will come and go and with it will be more honors classes. Students who take these “harder” classes will extend their chances to not be weeded out, after all when the goal is more school in the form of college, the “smart kids” are the ones working the hardest and they show it through taking honors or XL classes. Slowly during this year students will begin to notice that they have classes with mostly the same groups of other students, this is because when you take more difficult classes you don’t get put with kids who have been weeded out, you are put with other students who are on your level and share the same goals of success.
Junior year, in my experience is the most highly dreaded year of high school and is widely known to be the hardest. For the first time the students, climbing the ladder to success, are faced with A.P. classes. These classes are different from any classes students have taken thus far. They are weighted and weigh more on a students GPA than other classes. A.P. classes are time-consuming and for the first time for most students they do as much homework time as time in a school day. Staying up till one in the morning making sure that everything gets done to at least a somewhat legible extent becomes the norm, and often students facing the monster that is Junior Year are seen scrambling to finish the last few problems of their math homework during lunch or in the class period before. The coffee cups become more abundant in the morning and the phrase “I’m exhausted, I was up until midnight doing homework.” becomes the norm. Junior year pushes students to their limits and students continue to challenge themselves. One A.P. class, two, three, sometimes four! It becomes normal to have two timed essays in one day followed by a huge math test and a project due. This is, in m y opinion the most prominent time for weeding students out. Its hard. Its exhausting. Its time consuming. Its frustrating. It’s the dreaded Junior Year and it cam make or break a student. They are still expected to keep up the good grades and some are truly pushed to their limits for the fist time. It is not uncommon to fall short. Historically 4.0 students are scrambling to hang on to B’s and C’s. It is the time of reckoning, the time of proving oneself. Colleges, after all only take the best. Students have to fight to stay alive against this monster of Junior Year and to not be weeded out. After all, when grades can make or break a person they have to work as hard as they can to meet the requirements of the demanding classes. By this time these students refuse to be weeded out. They want to achieve the ultimate goal, but only these who work the hardest, those who are fit to overcome the obstacles can truly make it. When the ultimate goal is college, success, then everything is on the line.
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