In his essay, “Fear of Heights: Teachers, Parents, and Students are Wary of Achievement,” Bob Chase suggests that society should concentrate more on personal rather than personal level maintaining a certain degree of anti-intellectualism. Bob Chase, at the beginning, discusses two groups of students: those that focus more on academics and those that perform better at extra-curricular school activities. “Shockingly, most teachers say they are more concerned about the bright student than they are about the” C “student, (93).
The article mainly talks about the essence of extracurricular activities in a student’s life not only immersing oneself in books. Learning is not only measured by the amount of grades one scores, but it is an overall growth of the student, which includes participation in after school activities. Learning is more than reading books and scoring excellent grades in class. However, one should not overindulge in extracurricular activities and neglect one’s studies, but should strike a balance between the two. We should not get tormented working ourselves but should look for relaxing ways by engaging in extracurricular activities.
Bob mentions that students hold identical views between teachers and parents in a survey conducted by the research group, Public Agenda. The survey observes that 70 percent of parents were unsettled when their child received an excellent grade in academics, but lacked participation in extracurricular activities. A notable number of people agree to the fact that highly educated students are adept at studies, but they are deficient in common sense, in real life. Extracurricular activities play a more prominent role in a student’s life than even the academics in many communities. The performances of after-school activities gain more attention on the press than academic performances. Moreover, TIMSS feels that the education values in the U.S. should have an overhaul. “As long as teachers, parents, and students remain skeptical of academic excellence, we can act as a mediocrity tripod-endorsing a culture that promotes” normal “over achievement” (94). American students spend too much time in extracurricular activities, and there should be an implementation of new policies based on academics. Therefore, it is my belief that more people will support Bob’s opinion to have more concern on the “C” students than the star students. In fact, we need to start from different platforms since there are several reasons for paying more attention to the “A” students with fewer friends than the “C” students.
The first reason as to why we should worry more about the “A” student than the “C” student is that practice is more salient than the theoretical aspect. One may never gather enough experience from hard learning in some fields especially if one is taking business or a marketing degree. Books provide us with the basic principles of how to manage your employee, but they do not include all the nifty details of applying the knowledge at the professional level. One of my colleagues, Ben, who is also the student association manager, has plenty of choices to make about his organization on a regular basis. In addition, he has to deal with complicated interpersonal relationships among his members and try to create a harmonic atmosphere in his association. This busy step of his everyday life makes it hard for him to rest, so he has little time to cover his study. This makes him score a “C” at one of his courses. However, Ben is an MBA student, and scoring a “C” grade does not mean that he lacks the ability to run a team. This is because can become a prominent leader in his future work by applying the accumulated experience he gained while working as a monitor. Knowledge from books just provides us with some ideas, but some real life situations cannot be handled if one never meets them head-on. Therefore, for a student who would meet customers or run their own business in future, extracurricular activities deserve to get more attention because personal experience cannot be acquired from books.
Another reason an “A” student needs more attention is that the fact that, besides books, there are a variety of ways in which an individual can gain knowledge. Star pupils rely too much on books and ignore other forms of learning. We should pay attention to the experience and ability acquired through after class activities. This is because such experience can complement the academic aspects. It is with no doubt whatsoever that hard work of academic knowledge will cultivate in us strong sense of math and science.
However, they have no value in life if one does not know how to apply them or does not like them at all, yet one scores an “A” in the class. My friend Lily is studying computer science. In almost all of her subjects, she scored a “A” She is such a hard worker studying all day, but she finally got monotonous of books, and she never touches anything outside the classes. I think her main purpose is to get “A” and be proud of that. I have had an experience with other Computer Science students who behave the same way. Actually, some of them perform in the exact opposite way to Lily’s performance. She engages in many activities with her friends after class. This is on the contrary because they will not develop some compelling applications themselves, or even make use of the bugs found in PC games to program a new version that will be beneficial to them. They do these for fun, which make them hunger for new, practical knowledge and gain more strength in their field. They may not have satisfactory grades, but they know their strengths and capabilities.
On the other hand, losing motivation in academics is one of the reasons of getting concerned about “C” students who have too many extracurricular activities. What concerns Bob most is not that the after-class events are given too much attention by these students, but the lack of enthusiasm for learning. For example, another friend of mine, Yoyo, spends too much time on the social media chatting with her friends. She often leaves in the middle of class or does not complete her homework until it is due. She is not enthusiastic to learn new things. One ridiculous thing is that many numbers of people assume that she leads such an exemplary life as she appears to be the object of publicity everywhere. However, the truth is, sometimes she loses it. She hopes that the 2012 doomsday could be real so that she can get a relief from her confused life. For her situation, I agree with Bob Chase’s words because this group of people are those we should worry about and seriously consider the change we can make to the educational system to motivate such people.
Bob Chase puts forward some sound suggestions that we should worry more about the “C” student with excellent extra-curricular activities than the “A” students who have fewer friends. Bob only provides us with a generous view of treating this problem, which I try to split into different situations. For example, we should worry less about the “C” students because their excellent extra-curricular activities are valuable for their future. Therefore, star pupils need more trepidation when they cannot find any other thing to do except studying and scoring “As”.
On the contrary, “C” students have a low passion for studying, but focus too much on other things. It is not that easy to shape students into a straight ‘A’ student with few friends and a “C” student who is popular among his or her peers. Even though it is possible, it is not that easy to decide which side we need to worry more. From my point of view, as I analyzed before, it is entirely dependent on their reasons to be hardworking every day or live an active extracurricular – based life.