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Peer influence on academic performance
My life as a high school student
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Life in high school is not so easy for teenagers. There are many obstacles that students will have to overcome, such as the stress of homework, peer pressure, sexual activity, and most of all popularity. For many teens, popularity is a huge part of high school. Teens are expected to keep their grades up, have a social life, and to somehow have time for themselves and their family. Professor Allen stated that even if a student was very popular in high school, everyone still had the experiences of being rejected or feeling left out. No one can make it through four years of high school without emotional scars. Many will argue that popularity is about being likable. Others will argue that popularity is about being well-known. “The apparently golden status known as popularity is not what it seems” (McGownan, 2005). Social psychologists have recently realized that the “popular” kids are not especially well-liked--and they are not particularly nice, either says Kathleen (2005). Kathleen McGowan (2005) said that some students are much better liked than …show more content…
Carl (2010) says that “popularity means you have a well-established social place among peers who want to be with you, with whom you have social standing, with whom you can hang out, and who can provide the accepting companionship you need.” Students in high school fight to be the most popular. The pretty, wealthy girls are usually at the top and the handsome jocks who play sports, are up top along with them. The popular group includes the children that have a high self-esteem, and are proud of themselves and their life, they are very well liked, and people want to be more like them. This is why other children want to be friends with them, or at least be a part of their group. It is important to teenagers to be popular because they want to feel
The Geeks Shall Inherit The Earth is a book by Alexandra Robbins which summarizes the story of seven different teenagers that have many different problems, which many of todays teenagers also have. I found myself having many similarities to the teenagers in the story, for example, when with her group Whitney, the popular bitch, thinks “You didn't day that when we were alone, but now that you're in front of a group you do” (Robbins 21). I can relate to this because I feel as though many people are pressured to say or do things they normally wouldn't whenever they are with their group or ‘clique’. Robbins has this idea that the freaks and geeks, or “cafeteria fringe” will someday grow up and use what they are criticized for to become more successful than the other peopler people. She calls this the ‘Quirk Theory’ (Robbins page 11). This helped me to learn that right now, in high school, not being ‘popular’ may seem like the end of the world, but the reality of it is that after these four years, it wont even matter, but what will be important is how you learned to grow as a person and the true friendships that were made. This makes me want to focus more on my education and learning to grow as a person instead of focusing on how many friends I have or who I sit with at lunch, because truthfully it wont matter once high school is over.
Making the transition from middle school to high school is a huge stepping stone in a teenager’s life. High school represents both the ending of a childhood and the beginning of adulthood. It’s a rite of passage and often many teens have the wrong impression when beginning this passage. Most began high school with learning the last thing on their mind. They come in looking for a story like adventure and have a false sense of reality created through fabricated movie plots acted out by fictional characters. In all actuality high school is nothing like you see in movies, television shows, or what you read about in magazines.
As preteens and teens push for increasing independence from their parents, they tend to turn to their peers for guidance, acceptance, and security. For those who are low in self-esteem and confidence, their safety lies in fitting in and having a place to belong. Most people find a group in which they connect with in a healthy way while others make their way in cliques that give them security but at the price of their own values and individuality. The movie Mean Girls portrays how high school female social cliques operate and the effect they can have on girls. I will argue how if one doesn’t have a strong sense of self-identity, the opinions of others will become their identity.
Is adolescence really about fitting in or not standing out? Do you have any responsibility to those students who do not fit in? Do you hear that? Hush, and listen closely. Do you hear it now? The cries for help of the kids who don’t fit in with the crowd. The cries aren’t always loud. Sometimes they don’t make a sound. Stop and listen to them. Take responsibility for those kids and stand up for those kids who won’t stand up for themselves.
‘’High school is the best years of your life,’’ is a shibboleth commonly used by adults, but how true is this expression? As high school is a time in which one obtains freedom and independency, without having many responsibilities, some adults consider those years to have been the best of their lives. However, plenty of adolescents repudiate this, as they endure a lot of pressure during their high school period. In this essay, I will argue that, although adults often regard high school as the best time of their lives, it is a social institution that can be very threatening to adolescents, as issues such as peer pressure and parental expectations, which become evident in the teen movie High School Musical, generate a lot of tensions that can
Adolescent years are a time period in a human beings life where we search for a place that we are most comfortable. It is a time where we try to find friends with similar interests and those who will easily accept us for who we are. Once we are accepted by those friends, we tend to do more things with hopes of getting approval from “the group.” Trying to fit in during adolescence is a significant factor for self-motivation because it determines the level of being accepted and popularity amongst our peers. Through our year of adolescence we experiment and try to discover oneself as a person, but we also find what our strongest traits are that are used in order to be accepted, or to feel more popular. Popularity is defined as a state of being liked or accepted by a group of people (cite). As the group of people gets larger, so does that person’s popularity. For some people, popularity may come easy due to their charisma or looks, but there are those children who feel lonely due to their lack of popularity.
Most popular kids engage in a school sport which makes them well known and liked throughout their social atmosphere, not only by their peers, but by their teachers as well. Many outcast do not engage in these acts of physical teams like sports, but rather in other institutions such as a culture, theater, and various academic clubs. These tend to be labeled “uncool” and separate these kids from other students. Their “abnormal” interests, that vary from the conventional athletics, can make them looked down upon and questioned by others. Having these preferable extracurricular activities is normal, yet these kids tend to be misunderstood by the jocks who don’t have a particular preference to these clubs. Based on the same survey from stageoflife.com, interests are the second leading cause of teens feeling inferior to their peers at 49% (stageoflife.com). Also, “63% of teens say that their appearance is an important factor in their identity” (stageoflife.com). Kids feel that their ability in activities causes them to subordinate to others. Teens are often judged for these interests which should not happen since their enjoyments are irrelevant to popularity
High school is meant to be the time of your life, but for most seniors just like me it can be some of the most emotional and crazy time. The things in my past make me who I am today, and the things I do now are the first footsteps into the future. I’ve learned a lot about myself in these past four years, and I still have so much learning to do. This is my high school story; the good, bad, and the ugly.
In addition to playing difficult games, children start to become part of a social world. School is age graded, meaning that students are placed in grades based on their age. Children tend to only talk to those in their grade. Children in the same age tend to form their own social status. It is in this social aspect of middle childhood where popularity comes...
Adolescence is, for the most part, about fitting in. Most everybody wants friends and wants to feel like they are a part of a social group. Young childhoods are spent meeting new people and making friends that share your common interests. However, in the teenage years, it gets a lot more complicated. Some people will start to leave their old friends for newer, “cooler” ones, and start to wear new clothing to make themselves popular. Everyone wants to fit in, and some people will make more of an effort to do so than others. In middle school specifically, cliques and social groups start forming. This is the time when teens and pre-teens figure out who they are and start to fit in with their friends.
In one journal entry I wrote, I brought to light that the popular group is something that every one of us, for some reason feels as though we need to be a part of. This is from my own experience and things I have observed throughout my four-year career in high school. I think it was perhaps worse in junior high, however. When you are in seventh and eighth grade you are not sure of who you are and are desperately searching around for something to belong to, to be a part of. Why is this, why are we a society that are most often drawn to the most popular, "cool" and "beautiful" that high school has to offer? Why is acceptance the most important thing to us, is belonging really as important as losing your own sense of self? Who you hang out with, who your closest friends are as an adolescent without a doubt help to shape who you are. And it's funny that you seem to end up being friends with the ones who are the same type of people as you. Same fashion sense, taste in music or cars and movies. When searching for an identity in high school, it is hard not to just attempt to pick up the one that seems the most socially acceptable. I know that my personal experiences include these conforming characteristics. Still as a freshman in college I am constantly looking at the fashion of my peers, wondering to myself "do they think I fit in"? This was especially true the first few weeks of college when I wasn't sure who my good friends were going to be; I made sure that I dressed as well as I could everyday, in all the new clothes I had bought specifically for college.
It can also tie into being how “cool” a teen looks on their social platforms. Teens self-esteem can tie into how others think they see each other. Sometimes, to be “cool” teens need to have the latest clothes, shoes, and even phones. If they don’t have any of the latest trends they can become an outcast. For example, let’s say Tony is the only boy who doesn 't have the latest sweater in his school. Tony might feel bad and not have a ton of self-worth because all the other students are telling him that he isn 't cool. No self-worth means that the teen 's self-esteem has been lowered to a
I remember a time a few years back when I had a group of fairly close friends. We would always hang out with eachother and we would await the day at which we were to enter high school together. When we finally reached high school, there where now a whole new group of people that were older than I. I still had my group of friends, but gradually I started to lose one of them. My friend was going against my other schoolmate, and before I knew it I was hurling the same insults as they were. It was all part of a process; a process, I thought, was going to make me popular. I thought that if I could make someone look lower than I was, I would gain self-confidence and become more popular.
However not everyone is as fortunate to be socially popular with tons of friends. And with this comes social discrimination, a higher issue for teens, but that doesn’t leave adults out of the picture. For example in schools, we all either hate or love the popular kids, and/or love or hate the socially awkward kids. But purpose of the situation is that they don’t get along with each other. Also since they don’t get along, it causes drama, and even fights in school leaving a school with no peace. Many of these social discrimination conflicts can lead to school kids being bullied, for who they are and what they like. Most of these conflicts usually end in pain by either the popular kid and/or socially awkward one. They could be going through a rough time with family, health, etc. As for adults, they are just known to be grown children, because just like kids, teens, adolescents, parents will go against each other worse than kids. Humans are always trying to be on top of the food chain, a.k.a. the social ladder. But when things aren’t going their way, it can lead to an uproar that doesn’t point in the direction of
One part I missed out on was one of the biggest parts of popularity. It was that there are two types of popularity. One of them is the good popularity where everybody knows you for the good things you have done and wants to be around you. On the other hand there is a bad popularity where everybody knows you for the horrible and nasty things you have done and nobody wants to be around you. I figured out that I wasn’t the good popular at first either.