Culture 4.5

High school culture in general, and certainly at Albany High, is such that classes and tests are taken for a grade, not for enrichment; and to students, the ends justify any means.

Attitude is everything, and today’s high school attitudes allow students to Spark Note and cheat their way through high school without a trace of guilt.

This culture worries me.

With college right around the corner, students should be encouraged to find passion and importance in their lives rather than be convinced that without AP Biology and AP Calculus their college applications and their future will be inhibited.

I am scared that our generation has focused so much on getting into college that students have no clue what they want out of their college educations.

It is because of this mindset that I feel the need to state the obvious: college will not be the same as high school.

The biggest difference will be passion. There is a genuine lack of interest in the high school atmosphere, and the emphasis on AP classes and college only maintains this air of disinterest.

Too many high school students are fighting boredom while forcing themselves to study things that don’t interest them such as the function of amino acids or postmodernism.

According to Albany High senior Matthew Delbridge, “This high school culture puts people at a disadvantage in terms of finding what interests them. After doing all of the homework for classes you don’t care about and after all the extracurricular activities you do to boost college applications, what energy is left for passion?”

College will not be about forcing yourself through boring classes day after day, but about finding something that interests you.

I spent five weeks in Boston this summer studying at Berklee College of Music, and the first thing I noticed about my classes was the atmosphere. No heads were down no matter how tired we were and there were no uninterested faces.

I never thought I could enjoy music classes so much and music is what I want to spend the rest of my life doing. I’ve never enjoyed music classes at the high school, and I never knew why. It’s not the teacher and it’s not the students, it’s the culture.

In Boston, I was surrounded by people who shared a common interest and who were happy to be in class. In high school, the atmosphere is so clogged with disinterest that it takes away from passion.

A group of people with a common interest is hard to find in high school, partly because people don’t know what their true passions are. This itself is not a bad thing. The bad thing is how the pressure of the college-driven energy throughout high school hurts students’ ability to find what they really enjoy.

High school students, myself included, tend to feel that the more AP classes they take and the higher their GPAs, the better off they are. But when all of that is gone, which it will be soon, we are only left with ourselves, and what are we without passion?

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