Reply to Emotional needs of our students

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "Emotional needs of our students"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Actually, you are all missing what is really going on.  The rat race has been created by our nation's colleges and universities which have successfully pushed the first and sometimes second year of college down onto high school students via the AP courses.  This has worked out well for the colleges but puts incredible pressure on the students to get high test scores/high GPA/extracurriculars of note so they can get into a "good" college.  This problem is compounded at Langley, as a PP pointed out, where only 8-10 slots go to UVA a year (no longer a safety, definitely desireable, economic for us VA taxpayers) so DC's like my own didn't even bother applying.  Another contributing factor to the stress component is that colleges and universities are now being deluged with full-paying students from other countries, especially China.  In order to add "diversity" and cover all that glossy marketing materials and new buildings to attract students, the colleges bring in more and more overseas students.  This is especially true at second and third tier law schools.  So the pressure really started with colleges saying "WE WANT TO SEE DEPTH OF STUDY - how many A.P. courses did you take?"  So students comply.  Then, they get into Langley's AP courses, discover they are taught at the college level, their GPA is falling, so 300 (stats from two years ago) want OUT of AP because they can't handle the work and are stressed out of their head, but Langley can't handle that many reassignments.

The system is broken nationally.  It's not JUST the parents, JUST the teachers, JUST Langley, JUST T.J., Just Athelete preference, desireable skin color or legacies.  It's because colleges have pushed the first year of college down onto the high schools and no one yet has said STOP!  I applaud the parent who moved their child to a less stressful environment.  We did the same with DC who now loves school and has made honor roll (totally on his own, no parent involvement whatsoever) for seven quarters.  But very few parents living in this very expensive area can afford private school at the lower levels and then college expenses running as high as $67,000 a year.[/quote]

I agree with everything you've written, but I don't think you've gone far enough in your analysis. You've left out the important role the parent plays when he/she insists that the top schools are absolutely necessary for future success. You can help your child opt out of this nonsense by recognizing that there are other state schools besides UVA. There's even (gasp) the community college route to a 4-year school. You don't HAVE to play the game.[/quote]

NP here:  I agree.  We urged our senior DC not to play the UVA/W&M game for colleges.  DC applied to several other state schools, but not those two.[/quote]

Did your child not have a chance at either school? I don't mean to sound snarky but to me "not playing the game" would not be good enough reason to not apply to an excellent state school and possibly miss out on getting and having that experience. And I don't mean that your child couldn't have an amazing experience at another VA school.[/quote]

PP here:  our child probably had a fairly good shot (though who really knows, given the quotas, etc.) at getting into W&M and/or UVA, but didn't quite have the desire to go to either so we figured why bother.  There are other schools within VA that DC is interested in, as well as a couple of out-of-state.  For us, the whole UVA/W&M "admissions game" wasn't really worth the trouble.  Different strokes, etc.   [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics