Thinking Twice About Working Toward the U of Soughtafter
By Loren Olson’08
News Staff Reporter
Summer is almost here, replete with lemonade, croquet, and blue-card-filling work in nameless countries. There is a lot to look forward to. However, even as seniors caper about the edge of freedom’s periphery, I feel a great weight upon me. Literally. Laden like a quarry worker, I reach the summit of Library stairs with winded relief. Hands on knees, I wonder if Worker’s Compensation can be awarded for book-related injuries. While heavy homework is surely curving my spine, it is the work’s less perceptible ramifications that scare me. Some students can handle the pressure, many more cannot. Raving breakdowns aside, the sheer quantity of work is enough to make the most casual student fretful. (Or at the very least, mightily inconvenienced.)
But complaints on the subject are common. They form the braying of donkeys in this farmyard of a school: For a while, the listener is concerned, but as time progresses he learns to ignore the sound as part of standard mammalian behavior. Thus, the imposition of the heavy workload remains a standard, armed with two defenses: “If it is really so grueling, why aren’t there more students complaining?” and the ever popular “You choose to take these courses, you brought this work upon yourself.”
The first fortification is assailable in that there are, in fact, many students are complaining. However, it is always done individually and rarely focuses on the overall workload. Instead of truly questioning the premise, most students target one or two courses that are particularly troubling before seeking help from their advisers and deans. These complaints are then shuttled off to individual teachers, or to placement problems, preventing an effective volume from amassing and then landing squarely on the problem. On a social level, grumbling to your friends is an established part of the culture, while going to an administrator with the same concerns is construed as weak. More confusingly still, in our peer society the highest praise goes to the one who succeeds without appearing to try. After broadcasting the night’s offerings to the dinner table, a Choate student will rarely detail the effort that is exerted for each one. As a result, some students may feel embarrassed to go to a teacher, not knowing they aren’t the only one struggling with an assignment. Perhaps more sensibly, pupils fear their mentors will deem them lazy, or will penalize them later for ‘not making the class a priority,’ if they dare complain. These conflicting factors come at the student from different levels of Choate’s structure, capped with a final, smug, “Everyone else can handle it. Why can’t you?”
The second defense, that ‘we bring the strain of the workload upon ourselves’, is more difficult to counter in that it is blindingly true. Students can, and regularly do, opt to ‘drop out’ of one or more courses. I used the word ‘blindingly’ for a reason though: For many students, changing courses is not even a conscious option. College counselors, in an effort to keep their students sparklingly attractive, urge their would-be applicants to take the most challenging classes possible, and then excel. (Parents have a penchant for echoing this sentiment.) The threat of College hugely increases the stigma of ‘dropping down,’ or worse, dropping the subject entirely. Then there is the hugely important, but largely unspoken, competition within the school itself. One student ruefully summed-up the situation: “I hate that I look around and see my friends, and know we are trying to get the same spots at the same colleges.” Pressure to keep pace with peers may drive a student to remain in a course they cannot manage. Perhaps more shockingly, some students may actually enjoy the rigor of a difficult class. Though the work is ponderous, they will not risk losing the course over their inability to complete all the assignments A multitude of factors, with particular emphasis on ‘securing’ admission, all but force students to get into, and remain in, unsuitably punishing schedules. I am not suggesting that students lack free will, but instead that their will is actively commandeered by the assurance that the heavy workloads will guarantee their future success. We are told that our hard work now will pay off when we are accepted to U of Soughtafter, but with admission rates plummeting, the gerbil sometimes questions why it is running so fast on the wheel.
