Story Typical high school life...?

[RealLifeTamagotchi]

I went to a boarding school. The kids were nice, there was no bullying and teachers never shouted at students. The only problem was that everyone worked TOO hard.

We got up at 6:30 and we had classes till 18. After dinner we had to study from 19 to 23:30. Students who wanted to study more were free to do so until 1. We were allowed to go out once a week, and we visited our home once a month. Dating and mobile phones weren't allowed.

My weakest subject was math, so when term was over I used to go to a cram school. I spent 12 hours per day studying math during summer and winter breaks. But I always felt I wasn't trying hard enough because people around me were doing the same...or even more.

All this effort for a single exam(similar to SAT). Every year there are students who commit suicide because their scores aren't good enough. A kid in my school also died right after the exam. Some say that he choked on something and others say it was a heart attack but the truth is unknown.

Studying hard is good of course, but the sad thing is I never had enough time to think about my real future. I was too busy worrying about my grades.

I have never studied abroad, so I wonder if high school students around the world is having similar experiences. Did you also spend most of your day studying?

 

[BlueWidow]

I graduated from high school in the late 1980s and I hardly ever had to study. I graduated high school with a B+ average, an 89 I think. I spent a lot of my high school years depressed and on the psych ward, therefore it was difficult for me to focus on anything and study. If I had been able to focus and study more, I probably could've gotten an A or higher average.
I think kids today everywhere have a much harder time in high school than I did though. I've read that kids in Europe, China, and Japan in particular have a very difficult time.
I know they have a standardized test here in America that a lot of schools focus on all year long and don't teach anything else, or at least they did. I believe it was George W Bush who instituted it and it was called No Child Left Behind. Supposedly at the time, there were a lot of kids who were just being passed from one grade to another even though they weren't learning anything because the teachers were supposedly not putting in the effort to teach them. In order to correct this, the US government decided to base the funding a school got on how many students passed a standardized test. Therefore, it suddenly became critical for all schools to have as many students as possible passing this test with as high of a grade as they could. This, in turn, caused all the schools to throw out all the normal things they were teaching and to focus solely on making sure that every student passed this test so that they could continue to get funding for the next school year. Therefore, I think the things they were teaching may have had nothing at all to do with preparing their students for a future job or occupation. It was all about making sure they got the answers on that test correct so that the school would get funding for the next year. The most important thing to them was the funding, not teaching the students things they could use in the the future. I seem to remember hearing on the news that as the time to take this big test came closer, more and more students would become ill from worrying about passing the test. They were under a lot of pressure to pass that test, no matter what, so the school could get their funding for the next year. I believe I even remember hearing about suicides that happened both before and after the test, if a student didn't feel prepared for the test or didn't pass it. I think, in the end, what they did was take a bad situation and make it worse, which is what the US government usually does when they get involved in things. They usually seem to take a complicated and multifaceted situation and try to solve it with a one-size-fits-all solution. Of course, I think this is a simplistic view of the whole thing, since I am not a teacher and I haven't been a student in decades, and I don't have any kids who have been in school in the last 20 years or so.
I feel really horrible for all the young people in the United States though, because they go to school and then college and they collect all kinds of huge debt and a lot of them leave school with a degree that they can't use to get a job. I think at some point the whole system is going to collapse and be forced to reform. I don't think anything is going to happen until then though because there are too many people that are making too much money off of the current system, and they don't care what happens to all the young people who are in debt up to their eyeballs.

 

[TAW122]

My typical high school life (back in the early-to-mid 2000's) was utter shit, at least for the first two years. I had to deal with bad homelife (won't get into this too much here), external pressures, and of course, bullies during my high school years. It really sucked and that was one of the first really dark times in life and I had even considered running away, death, or whatever. I've disassociated myself with life so far that I legit didn't care what happened to me, because everything just sucked. It didn't help that I didn't have copes at the time (parents were authoritarian and took away games and stuff) so not much video games if at all. I thought about ways to end life (yes, even at age 14 at the time), but didn't have a good means to. I was also vengeful so I always fantasized about getting even and then taking myself out to avoid counter-retaliation from my enemies (Note: I don't encourage violence or any illegal acts.). It was basically me. vs the world scenario back then. However, things eased up a bit in my Junior and Senior years, went to a prestigious conservatory (had to audition to get in and I made it) so the bullying problem ceased, but I was already too far behind in social development, Aspergers fucked me over too, and also there was still drama so I couldn't capitalize on things then. It didn't help that I had social anxiety either. College was also generally better overall, but still pretty lonely and sucky but that's another story for another time.