Four Years Until the Real World
The distinction between “high school” and the “real world” is an unspoken standard that everyone seems to understand. Somehow, we all have the same definition of “real.” According to the dictionary, “real” means “not imitation or artificial; genuine.” So, if we believe that high school isn’t a part of the “real world,” we know that it is fake, it is manufactured, and most of all, it is completely detached from what students will experience later on in their lives. But why? What is the point of spending countless years in a place that does little to prepare everyone for what is to come? That’s supposed to be the purpose of high school: to prepare students for their lives where they’ll go to college and eventually have to work, have to live with little support, have to balance money, have to find a way to make their own mark on the world before they die. But we all know that this purpose is not really met. That’s not a secret.
College is a completely new experience, where you are essentially left on your own to figure out what exactly you need to do to first survive, and then maybe thrive if you’re lucky. The shock of leaving home is the first indication that you are in no way prepared like you thought, and it sets the stage for the academic struggles. When, in high school, we are finishing those lengthy AP assignments at ungodly hours, we can at least be in our own rooms, in our own homes, where we feel comfortable and safe. A college dorm room the size of a utility closet shared with another hyper stressed roommate does nothing to help keep you calm. At least at home, your parents are there to support you. I don’t care what everyone says about finally getting away from overbearing mothers and being free, I am going to miss my mom. I am going to miss her cooking dinner for me while I’m suffering malnourishment from a Ramen Noodle diet in college, I am going to miss her bringing me tea late at night out of pity for my workload, I am going to miss her washing my clothes while I inevitably destroy everything I own in a public washing machine. But most of all, I am going to miss the sense of calm and security she brings me just by being around. We all go from being coddled to pushed out of the nest with one swift kick, and there is no intermediate phase for us to have time to grow our wings. Fending for yourself for the first time is a horribly burdensome task. Add this to the most difficult academics you’ve ever faced, and it becomes hard to imagine how anyone can handle it.
But apparently, we can’t handle it, because one of the most worrisome aspects of college is the growing statistics of mental illness and stress levels that create nervous breakdowns, where students end up in the hospital. Now, here we come to the intellectual sphere. There have been countless stories of deleterious college academics on the news, and more and more studies are being devoted to figuring out exactly why advanced students are suddenly failing in college, some even taking their own lives out of desperation.
One of the reasons for this complex issue is simple. High schools offer college level classes, offer AP classes, and they are very difficult. But they are not the college brand of difficult. The elite students are the ones who fall prey to this trap. They lose sleep and pump up their stress levels with countless APs and advanced classes, they manage to do exceptionally well, and they then get accepted into one of the top colleges in the country. This feeling of pride and relief that high school is over, however, quickly goes away after the summer months, as the dread of realizing that everything they did in high school, every class that they took even though it almost killed them, was worthless. It’s nothing compared to college academia. Sure, high school was hard, and it’s not so much a question of the advanced level, but the way the classes are run.
One student from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, currently ranking #7 out of United States universities, said, in her official school blog, “I don’t think many people understand what we mean when we say that MIT is hard. It’s not just the workload.” In our AP classes, we get immense piles of work thrust upon us that leave us awake until 2 A.M., which we manage to get done without much feeling, like little robots churning out outline after essay after packet. Of course college is going to have the same pile of work, probably more, but the reason it’s significantly difficult is because we are in such a new environment, and our classes are not formatted the way they used to be. We are left to the lions. Welcome to the jungle, everyone.
No one is there to hold our hand. No one is there to manage our time for us. Assignments in college are long, and many of them are due over an extended period of time. It’s not like math class, where you hand in a worksheet the next day. Wait until the night before to complete a long term college assignment…well, there’s really no way to finish that, because it’s impossible to complete one of those assignments in a night. But that’s okay, because you probably won’t even know when it’s due. One student told me that all of his due dates were distributed in the class syllabus, not written on the chalkboard behind the stereotypical desk with the stereotypical apple sitting there, glinting in the harsh classroom lighting. Those who didn’t read the syllabus had no hope of passing.
But, I mean, once again, that’s really fine, because we are all essentially expected to fail anyway. In any high school, you can find students bragging about a 4.0 GPA and never failing a test and still managing to have multiple extracurriculars while taking every AP ever offered in the history of the education system. This badge of honor does not hold in college. Your first calculus test will have an F on it, and of course you can’t get upset about it, because what did you expect? It doesn’t matter if you weren’t taught all of the material on the test. It doesn’t matter if one of the questions was based solely off of a caption on page 1,052, you should have read it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand what the reading was even about, you should have reread it and then accepted that failure is inevitable, but failure is OK. We learn from failure, but the spirits of the AP veterans hang in the balance, crushed a little more with each day. We can’t fail in high school. Therefore, we are conditioned to believe that failure is always inherently bad. Teachers tell us what’s going to be on the test, and if a question is too hard, then out of pity, they walk us through it. Ask a professor to walk you through a test question, they’ll laugh in your face. And then they’ll fail you.
Remember, no hand-holding. Independence and initiative are good things, but students can’t be expected to know how to use them properly when they’ve essentially had no freedom throughout high school. Think about our most basic human needs: We have to ask to use the bathroom. Then, if fortunate enough to be granted permission, we have to wear a pass around our neck that is a symbol of what class we came from, and that we do have permission to exist in some place outside of the classroom for about five minutes. This way, teachers know where we are going, and can read the pass to figure out where to return us if we get lost and are found wandering aimlessly. The administration clearly thinks we are all too incompetent to have the self-control of using the bathroom and safely returning without casualties. How, then, can we survive living on our own, or failing occasionally and being forced to learn from our mistakes without someone telling us exactly what that lesson should be?
I believe that people are aware that there is such a disconnect between high school and college. However, they believe that this is the way school has been for a while, and we’ve gotten this far as a society, so changing it is fruitless. But society changes, and the flawed system is starting to become inoperable. Depending on the day you ask me, I can’t wait until it’s time for college, and I feel optimistic about my future. On another day, I get anxious thinking about how much harder everything is going to be, and how I don’t think that I can handle all of that change. Because really, that’s the key word here: change. No matter what, college is going to be a change from high school, and change is always frightening. But we need to make this change less drastic and less overly daunting. If we are not prepared for college, then college cannot prepare us for our lives to come in the “real world”.
We need to stop living in a fake world for four years.
