Most students feel pressure from many different angles: their families to do well in school, their friends to do what they do and their teachers to do all work assigned and to be good students.
Yet the way that students handle the pressure varies from person to person. Some students don’t live up to the standards set and fail, and some students go out of their way to do the best they can.
Friends can create pressure that most of the time parents and teachers do not understand. Everyone wants to belong to a group of people that understands them. Sometimes this is a good thing for kids who want clean relationships with their friends and who just want to hang out. They participate in healthy activities and have good times.
Yet there are those students who want to make truly bad decisions. It usually begins with experimentation; wanting to try something new with somebody new. After a while, they find themselves doing things that they never would have done otherwise.
These people throw away perfectly good lives because they simply didn’t want to deal with the pressure that they faced.
The students that are under more family and teacher pressure are the ones that are very bright and very intelligent. They are faced with the challenge of always raising the bar one level higher. They are the ones that cannot slip, for if they do, they face disappointing their families. This kind of pressure—or any amount of pressure for that matter—can cause stress.
For the really smart kids, this is a high level of stress and can strain a social life, which can be considered critical as it shows how they can interact with others and it gives them a break from school. Some students can get through their school years and only live for that kind of demand, that kind of life that challenges their minds, but not all of them. Some students have parents driven to make their children successful and will do anything to get their kids secure lives at any cost. This can cause a sense of hopelessness, a feeling of “I have to do this because my parents want me to” that can lead to strong rebellion and severe consequences. Or it can lead to “They don’t care about me, they care about my grades.”
People handle pressure in many different ways. Some deal with it, tough it out and reap in their rewards in the future. Some don’t deal with it and turn down a wrong path that leads to eventual destruction. Some take it so bad that they feel that there is no way out. Pressure can cause some of our greatest minds and some of our most creative thoughts to alter and change, for the worse or for the better..
Tiffany R. Lamb is a student at Batavia High School in Batavia, N.Y. She is a big sister to a 3-month-old baby brother whom she adores and has been published five times in various books of poetry.
