Junior High and High School Are Challenging

¶ … junior high and high school are challenging in at least one aspect. For popular children, the academic aspect may be difficult to handle, while academically strong students may find it difficult to fit in with the particular social setup of the place and time within which they grow up. In fact, fitting in with this type of social environment may seem like the most important element of life for the teenager in question, regardless of how strong he or she is academically.

This may be particularly challenging when a student is from a background that is not necessarily assumed to be strong in an academic sense. The writers Rodriguez and Rose, for example, address challenges that might be faced by students who enter the academic world from a working class background in their essays The Achievement of Desire and I Just Want to be Average, respectively.

These essays address issues that can be compared, such as the challenges and benefits that might be derived from an education, even from a working class context. They way in which the authors go about making these points, however, contrast significantly, with Rodriquez focusing on the effect of education on family life and the price of above average performance, while Rose focuses on the way in which working class students might choose to avoid the rigors of academic performance by remaining average, and the inherent price that this might entail.

Focusing on his success, Rodriguez considers the basic separation that education created between himself and the life he knew before becoming a student. When he began to focus on education as an important element in his life, he experienced a separation from the life he was used to before he entered education. In this way, what he gained by becoming a more academically focused person also meant a loss in terms of his separation from the family and friends he knew while growing up.

In essence, what this means is that he became emotionally more detached when expressing himself, whereas his self-expression among family members prior to his academic education was always colored with emotional language. Between home and school, he faces a fundamental difference between expressing himself in an emotionally rich way and using a more detached way to express himself. This was a particular challenge Rodriquez faced when entering the world of academic achievement.

His new world was one of order, calm and intellectual thought, which was the complete opposite of the world that represented his home life. This made it necessary for him to unravel himself from an identity he cultivated throughout his years as a child in his family home. Rose's work focuses very much on the separation between the expectations teachers and educational programs in general have in terms of student achievement and the actual ability of students to reach these expectations.

One of the main pieces of advice Rose gives is to "float the mark you set" meaning that expecting low standards from students will more than likely result in less than high 1 quality results. Rose offers the example of a program meant to prepare under-achieving students for practical jobs. Students were not challenged or expected to reach any level of potential. This resulted in students who typically underachieved as a result of the lack of challenge.

Rose and Rodriguez both acknowledge that life for a working class student can become challenging when entering the academic world. The main difference between the two authors, however, is the particular form that this challenge takes. For Rodriguez, the challenge lies in the differences experienced when the child leaves his or her home environment to enter the academic world. There is an extreme difference between the types of communication at home and in the school environment.

For Rodriquez, the difference lay in the emotional content of both kinds of education, where academic communication is far less emotional than the communication with which the child grew up in the family home. Rose is far less specific about the differences between a working class child's academic and home life. Instead, the focus is on the differences between what a child can potentially achieve and what is expected of him or her.

Rose, it seems, implies that working-class children tend to be expected to achieve a lower level of academic excellence than other, more academically inclined children. Since working-class children tend to be thrust into programs that expect less of them than they can in fact achieve, the tendency is for them to reach this expected lower achievement. This, in turn, perpetuates the general concept of these students as less academically gifted than their higher-class counterparts. In addition to the acknowledgement that academic life is challenging for working-class.