Academic Pressure Quotes

If you want to find the real competition, just look in the mirror. After awhile you'll see your rivals scrambling for second place.

K-pop export model: the star-making process is so unpleasant that there are not many countries whose aspiring stars would put up with it. Korean youth, meanwhile, are used to intense sadomasochistic academic pressure, extreme discipline, constant criticism, and zero sleep. Of

The phenomenon of peer pressure and its impact on academic achievement has reached catastrophic proportions. It has now reached a point that to do well academically in school is to act white and risk being called a nerd or a brainiac. For males, the peer pressure is so great, you may be called a sissy.

Do right-handed people live longer than lefties? Then again, there are some things about lefties that can't be explained so easily. For whatever reason, whether it's the pressures of living in a world designed for righties, or all the talk of having shorter life spans, lefties have higher rates of depression, drug abuse, allergies, and schizophrenia. But lefties also have an advantage in sports like fencing, tennis and baseball, not to mention greater academic success and higher IQs. Five of America's last eleven presidents were lefties, even though they make up only 10 percent of the American population." (I believe Obama is a leftie as well, making that 6 of the last 12 presidents).

(Talking about the movement to deny the prevalence and effects of adult sexual exploitation of children) So what does this movement consist of? Who are the movers and shakers? Well molesters are in it, of course. There are web pages telling them how to defend themselves against accusations, to retain confidence about their ‘loving and natural’ feelings for children, with advice on what lawyers to approach, how to complain, how to harass those helping their children. Then there’s the Men’s Movements, their web pages throbbing with excitement if they find ‘proof’ of conspiracy between feminists, divorcing wives and therapists to victimise men, fathers and husbands. Then there are journalists. A few have been vitally important in the US and Britain in establishing the fightback, using their power and influence to distort the work of child protection professionals and campaign against children’s testimony. Then there are other journalists who dance in and out of the debates waggling their columns behind them, rarely observing basic journalistic manners, but who use this debate to service something else – a crack at the welfare state, standards, feminism, ‘touchy, feely, post-Diana victimhood’. Then there is the academic voice, landing in the middle of court cases or inquiries, offering ‘rational authority’. Then there is the government. During the entire period of discovery and denial, not one Cabinet minister made a statement about the prevalence of sexual abuse or the harm it caused. Finally there are the ‘retractors’. For this movement to take off, it had to have ‘human interest’ victims – the accused – and then a happy ending – the ‘retractors’. We are aware that those ‘retractors’ whose parents trail them to newspapers, television studios and conferences are struggling. Lest we forget, they recanted under palpable pressure.

The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability. This could be achieved when the German steel barons were forced to deal with and to receive socially Hitler's the housepainter and self-admitted former derelict, as it could be with the crude and vulgar forgeries perpetrated by the totalitarian movements in all fields of intellectual life, insofar as they gathered all the subterranean, nonrespectable elements of European history into one consistent picture. From this viewpoint it was rather gratifying to see that Bolshevism and Nazism began even to eliminate those sources of their own ideologies which had already won some recognition in academic or other official quarters. Not Marx's dialectical materialism, but the conspiracy of 300 families; not the pompous scientificality of Gobineau and Chamberlain, but the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"; not the traceable influence of the Catholic Church and the role played by anti-clericalism in Latin countries, but the backstairs literature about the Jesuits and the Freemasons became the inspiration for the rewriters of history. The object of the most varied and variable constructions was always to reveal history as a joke, to demonstrate a sphere of secret influences of which the visible, traceable, and known historical reality was only the outward façade erected explicitly to fool the people. To this aversion of the intellectual elite for official historiography, to its conviction that history, which was a forgery anyway, might as well be the playground of crackpots, must be added the terrible, demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change his own past at will, and that the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition. Not Stalin’s and Hitler's skill in the art of lying but the fact that they were able to organize the masses into a collective unit to back up their lies with impressive magnificence, exerted the fascination. Simple forgeries from the viewpoint of scholarship appeared to receive the sanction of history itself when the whole marching reality of the movements stood behind them and pretended to draw from them the necessary inspiration for action.

There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come. There are, of course, moments when the pressure of the excitement is so great that only superhuman self-control could resist it. They come both in war and peace. We must do the best we can. The second enemy is frustration—the feeling that we shall not have time to finish. If I say to you that no one has time to finish, that the longest human life leaves a man, in any branch of learning, a beginner, I shall seem to you to be saying something quite academic and theoretical. You would be surprised if you knew how soon one begins to feel the shortness of the tether, of how many things, even in middle life, we have to say "No time for that," "Too late now," and "Not for me." But Nature herself forbids you to share that experience. A more Christian attitude, which can be attained at any age, is that of leaving futurity in God's hands. We may as well, for God will certainly retain it whether we leave it to Him or not. Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment "as to the Lord." It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.

Through most of human history, our ancestors had children shortly after puberty, just as the members of all nonhuman species do to this day. Whether we like the idea or not, our young ancestors must have been capable of providing for their offspring, defending their families from predators, cooperating with others, and in most other respects functioning fully as adults. If they couldn't function as adults, their young could not have survived, which would have meant the swift demise of the human race. The fact that we're still here suggests that most young people are probably far more capable than we think they are. Somewhere along the line, we lost sight of – and buried – the potential of our teens.

As much as I loved all the academic and extracurricular work I did, I hated the intense pressure to succeed: pressure from my parents and pressure from within myself. And, specifically, pressure to succeed in something that would land me a lucrative job out of college rather than what necessarily what made me happiest.

This is an age-old fantasy. I remember reading a quote from the apologist Edward John Carnell in Ian Murray’s biography of the Welsh preacher David Martyn Lloyd-Jones. During the formative years of Fuller Theological Seminary, Carnell said regarding evangelicalism, “We need prestige desperately.” Christians have worked hard to position themselves in places of power within the culture. They seek influence academically, politically, economically, athletically, socially, theatrically, religiously, and every other way, in hopes of gaining mass media exposure. But then when they get that exposure—sometimes through mass media, sometimes in a very broad-minded church environment—they present a reinvented designer pop gospel that subtly removes all of the offense of the gospel and beckons people into the kingdom along an easy path. They do away with all that hard-to-believe stuff about self-sacrifice, hating your family, and so forth. The illusion is that we can preach our message more effectively from lofty perches of cultural power and influence, and once we’ve got everybody’s attention, we can lead more people to Christ by taking out the sting of the gospel and nurturing a user-friendly message. But to get to these lofty perches, “Christian” public figures water down and compromise the truth; then, to stay up there, they cave in to pressure to perpetuate false teaching so their audience will stay loyal.

Today, acknowledgement of the prevalence and harms of child sexual abuse is counterbalanced with cautionary tales about children and women who, under pressure from social workers and therapists, produce false allegations of ‘paedophile rings’, ‘cult abuse’ and ‘ritual abuse’. Child protection investigations or legal cases involving allegations of organised child sexual abuse are regularly invoked to illustrate the dangers of ‘false memories’, ‘moral panic’ and ‘community hysteria’. These cautionary tales effectively delimit the bounds of acceptable knowledge in relation to sexual abuse. They are circulated by those who locate themselves firmly within those bounds, characterising those beyond as ideologues and conspiracy theorists. However firmly these boundaries have been drawn, they have been persistently transgressed by substantiated disclosures of organised abuse that have led to child protection interventions and prosecutions. Throughout the 1990s, in a sustained effort to redraw these boundaries, investigations and prosecutions for organised abuse were widely labelled ‘miscarriages of justice’ and workers and therapists confronted with incidents of organised abuse were accused of fabricating or exaggerating the available evidence. These accusations have faded over time as evidence of organised abuse has accumulated, while investigatory procedures have become more standardised and less vulnerable to discrediting attacks. However, as the opening quotes to this introduction illustrate, the contemporary situation in relation to organised abuse is one of considerable ambiguity in which journalists and academics claim that organised abuse is a discredited ‘moral panic’ even as cases are being investigated and prosecuted.

He turns the conversation to that banal subject, fascinating to non-writers, of why writers write. Ego enhancement, sure. What else? Psychological imbalance? Neurosis? Trauma? And if trauma, how far can trauma go before it stops being stimulating and becomes destructive? Academic pressures to publish, do those mean anything? Not much, we agree. How about the reforming impulse, a passion for social justice? Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what? Who appoints them as mouthpieces? If they appoint themselves, as they clearly do, how valid is the commission? If Time alone makes masterpieces, as Anatole France thought, then great writing is just trial and error tested by time, and if it’s that, then above all it has to be free, it has to flow from the gift, not from outside pressures. The gift is its own justification, and there is no way of telling for sure, short of the appeal to posterity, whether it’s really worth something or whether it’s only the ephemeral expression of a fad or tendency, the articulation of a stereotype.

The data emerging about the mental health of our kids only confirms the harm done by asking so little of our kids when it comes to life skills, yet so much of them when it comes to adhering to the academic plans we’ve made for them and achieving more, ever more academically. They are stressed out of their minds and have no resilience with which to cope with that stress, and we continue along our pressurizing path, as if this trauma is not happening, or as if somehow our kids’ struggles—this suffering—is, or will be, “worth it.” The guidance center bulletin from any

The macrohistorical log is largely siloed across different corporate servers, on the premises of Twitter and Facebook and Google. The posts are typically not digitally signed or cryptographically timestamped, so much of the content is (or could be) from bots rather than humans. Inconvenient digital history can be deleted by putting sufficient pressure on centralized social media companies or academic publishers, censoring true information in the name of taking down “disinformation,” as we’ve already seen. And the advent of AI allows highly realistic fakes of the past and present to be generated.

Are you bothered because he says he could see us together? Or is there something else?” Sam's voice had grown quieter with that last question. Devin looked up from the board to see something he'd never thought he'd see from Sam. An expression that, on anyone else, would've been more than curious. It was open, vulnerable. A naked longing that disappeared as soon as Devin was sure he knew what it was, to be replaced by Sam pressing his lips together and looking down at the board again. Wow. Okay. That made this conversation a hell of a lot more interesting. Maybe Sam had spent so much time analyzing Devin because he wanted to know if he had a chance. Devin wasn't sure how he felt about that. “I'm not in love with the idea that you guys have talked about me,” Devin said. “It's strange.” “I'm sorry our conversation made you feel that way,” Sam said. “I honestly wouldn't have said anything if you didn't want to know.” “I know, I asked for it,” Devin responded. “About...us.” Dev looked up in time to see Sam's expression change before the mask slid back into place. “You don't think it's weird?” Sam's lips trembled as he fought down a smile. “I think,” he began, reaching across the table, “life is full of possibilities.” He touched the back of Devin's hand with the tips of his fingers, gently stroking the skin. “If this isn't one you want to take advantage of, then you shouldn't feel pressured to do so.” It wasn't Devin's imagination that the temperature in the room had risen. It was one thing when Sam was getting into his head on a purely academic level. It was another thing when Sam looked at him from beneath thick lashes as if he could unravel Devin from the inside out if given half the chance. And he so wanted that chance. Holy hell. The little nerd was trying to seduce him.

It is tragic, too, that students now describe themselves as mentally ill when facing what are the routine demands of student life and independent living. The NUS survey reports that students' feelings of crippling mental distress are primarily course-related and due to academic pressure. In 2013, in response to that year's NUS mental health survey, an article cheerily entitled 'Feeling worthless, hopeless ... who'd be a university student in Britain?' listed one young writer's anxiety-inducing student woes that span the whole length of her course: 'Grueling interview processes are not unusual, especially for courses like medicine, dentistry, and veterinary science, or for institutions like Oxbridge'. And then: 'Deadlines come thick and fast for first-year students, and for their final-year counterparts, the recession beckons'. Effectively, the very requirements of just being a student are typified as inducing mental illness. It can be hard to have sympathy with such youthful wimpishness. But I actually don't doubt the sincerity of these 'severe' symptoms experienced by stressed-out students. That is what is most worrying--they really are feeling over-anxious about minor inconveniences and quite proper academic pressure.

But they make an enormous difference to the respect the person commands in his or her social circle. To express the wrong opinion on a politicized issue can make one an oddball at best—someone who “doesn’t get it”—and a traitor at worst. The pressure to conform becomes all the greater as people live and work with others who are like them and as academic, business, or religious cliques brand themselves with left-wing or right-wing causes. For pundits and politicians with a reputation for championing their faction, coming out on the wrong side of an issue would be career suicide. Given these payoffs, endorsing a belief that hasn’t passed muster with science and fact-checking isn’t so irrational after all—at least, not by the criterion of the immediate effects on the believer. The

American parents and educators are told to give children choices, to respect their desires, to ask them questions as opposed to issuing orders, to refrain from pressuring or coercing them to do work they don’t want to do, and to offer positive reinforcement all the time. Children are supposed to want to do the work—otherwise, they shouldn’t have to do it. In contrast, the scripts that Asian culture offers its parents include statements, not questions, and orders, not requests. Children are routinely told what to do, and particularly when it comes to academic work, parents and educators don’t spend much time asking them what they want or catering to those desires. Asian parents see these scripts as the natural order of the family and society; the elder has wisdom and a responsibility to teach and discipline the child, and the child needs to learn from those elders.

The erosion of trust in public school systems has had catastrophic consequences, and will take decades to put right. As we’ve seen, attempts to make schools ‘more accountable’ for their test scores leave teachers torn between what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls ‘doing the right thing and doing the required thing’. The right thing is to teach students through personalised, flexible methods, according to their needs, interests and aspirations; the required thing is to ‘turnaround’ test scores, by ‘teaching to the test’ or, worse, ‘gaming’ the system.  Successive US federal administrations have sought to improve school standards through high accountability. The pressure this puts upon schools at risk of closure and teachers – with test scores linked to pay rates – is intense. During 2011/12 a series of allegations emerged of inner-city schools in New York, Washington DC, Atlanta and Philadelphia ‘cheating’ on student test scores in order to hit accountability targets. Undoubtedly a case of fear producing wrong figures. The result of doing the required thing, above the right thing, is what Schwartz describes as a ‘de-moral-ised’ profession. The double tragedy is that, in addition to the pressure put on teachers – 50 percent of new teachers in the US leave the profession within their first five years – there’s growing evidence that the over-reliance on standardised testing fails to improve academic learning anyway.

Even worse, traditional grading that penalizes students for mistakes often isn’t just limited to a student’s academic work. Teachers often assign grades based on mistakes in students’ behaviors as well: downgrading a score if an assignment is late, subtracting points from a daily participation grade if a student is tardy to class, or lowering a group’s grade if the group becomes too noisy while they work. In this environment, every mistake is penalized and incorporated into the final grade. Even if just a few points are docked for forgetting to bring a notebook to class or losing a few points for not heading a paper correctly, the message is clear: All mistakes result in penalties. While some might argue that this is simply accountability—“I asked the students to do something, so it has to count”—it’s missing the forest for the trees. The more assignments and behaviors a teacher grades, the less willing a student will be to reveal her weaknesses and vulnerability. With no zones of learning that are “grade free,” it becomes nearly impossible to build an effective teacher–student relationship and positive learning environment in which students try new things, venture into unfamiliar learning territory, or feel comfortable making errors, and grow. When everything a student does is graded, and every mistake counts against her grade, that student can perceive that to receive a good grade she has to be perfect all of the time. Students don’t feel trust in their teachers, only the pressure to conceal weaknesses and avoid errors.

The intolerance and cancel culture have spread to outright discrimination in hiring, promotion, grants, and publication of professors and graduate students who do not abide the ideology demanded by the campus revolutionaries. A March 1, 2021, study by Eric Kaufmann of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology found, among other things: “Over 4 in 10 US and Canadian academics would not hire a Trump supporter… ; only 1 in 10 academics support firing controversial professors, nonetheless, while most do not back cancellation, many are not opposed to it, remaining non-committal; right-leaning academics experience a high level of institutional authoritarianism and peer pressure; in the US, over a third of conservative academics and PhD students have been threatened with disciplinary action for their views, while 70% of conservative academics report a hostile departmental climate for their beliefs; in the social sciences and humanities, over 9 in 10 Trump-supporting academics… say they would not feel comfortable expressing their views to a colleague; more than half of North American and British conservative academics admit self-censoring in research and teaching; younger academics and PhD students, especially in the United States, are significantly more willing than older academics to support dismissing controversial scholars from their posts, indicating that the problem of progressive authoritarianism is likely to get worse in the coming years; [and] a hostile climate plays a part in deterring conservative graduate students from pursuing careers in academia….

The third serious problem the culture of customer service as we know it creates is turning every profession into a customer service tool to generate profits. In doing so, we risk the loss of creativity, quality, and critical thinking in many walks of life. Nowhere is this risk clearer and more damaging than viewing students at different educational institutions as customers, and nowhere this trend has been happening more rapidly than at schools, colleges, and universities, especially at private institutions. There is severe damage done to creativity and critical thinking when all students want is an A, and in fact feel entitled to get it since they (or their parents) are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend elite schools. Many educators are under enormous pressure to give students grades they do not deserve in order to avoid receiving bad student evaluations (or to ensure getting good ones). This pressure is intensifying as academic jobs become increasingly contingent and precarious, where teaching staff are hired under short contracts only renewed based on so-called ‘performance,’ which is often measured by student evaluations and enrollment. When this happens, academic and intellectual compromises and corruption increase. Colleagues at elite American universities have been pressured to give students grades no lower than a B, with the explanation that this is what is ‘expected.’ Rampant grade inflation is unethical and unacceptable. Unfortunately, when graduate instructors resist professors’ instructions to fix grades by grading according to independent criteria of intellectual merit, they may be verbally chastised or worse, fired. This humiliation not only reinforces the norm of inflating grades, it also bolsters the power of the tenured professors who instruct their teaching assistants to do it.

Financial Times commentator Martin Wolf concluded in 2010: "We already know that the earthquake of the past few years has damaged Western economies, while leaving those of emerging countries, particularly Asia, standing. It has also destroyed Western prestige. The West has dominated the world economically and intellectually for at least two centuries. That epoch is now over. Hitherto, the rulers of emerging countries disliked the West's pretensions, but respected its competence. This is true no longer. Never again will the West have the sole word." I was reminded of the Asian financial crisis in 1997. When Asian economies were devastated by similarly foolish borrowing the West – including the International Monetary Fund and World Bank – prescribed bitter medicine. They extolled traditional free market principles: Asia should raise interest rates to support sagging currencies, while state spending, debt, subsidies should be cut drastically. Banks and companies in trouble should be left to fail, there should be no bail-outs. South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia were pressured into swallowing the bitter medicine. President Suharto paid the ultimate price: he was forced to resign. Anger against the IMF was widespread. I was in Los Angeles for a seminar organised by the Claremont McKenna College to discuss, among other things, the Asian crisis. The Thai speaker resorted to profanity: F-- the IMF, he screamed. The Asian press was blamed by some Western academics. If we had the kind of press freedoms the West enjoyed, we could have flagged the danger before the crisis hit. Western credibility was torn to shreds when the financial tsunami struck Wall Street. Shamelessly abandoning the policy prescriptions they imposed on Asia, they decided their banks and companies like General Motors were too big to fail. How many Asian countries could have been spared severe pain if they had ignored the IMF? How vain was their criticism of the Asian press, for the almost unfettered press freedoms the West enjoyed had failed to prevent catastrophe.

See especially academia, which has effectively become a hope labor industrial complex. Within that system, tenured professors—ostensibly proof positive that you can, indeed, think about your subject of choice for the rest of your life, complete with job security, if you just work hard enough—encourage their most motivated students to apply for grad school. The grad schools depend on money from full-pay students and/or cheap labor from those students, so they accept far more master’s students than there are spots in PhD programs, and far more PhD students than there are tenure-track positions. Through it all, grad students are told that work will, in essence, save them: If they publish more, if they go to more conferences to present their work, if they get a book contract before graduating, their chances on the job market will go up. For a very limited few, this proves true. But it is no guarantee—and with ever-diminished funding for public universities, many students take on the costs of conference travel themselves (often through student loans), scrambling to make ends meet over the summer while they apply for the already-scarce number of academic jobs available, many of them in remote locations, with little promise of long-term stability. Some academics exhaust their hope labor supply during grad school. For others, it takes years on the market, often while adjuncting for little pay in demeaning and demanding work conditions, before the dream starts to splinter. But the system itself is set up to feed itself as long as possible. Most humanities PhD programs still offer little or nothing in terms of training for jobs outside of academia, creating a sort of mandatory tunnel from grad school to tenure-track aspirant. In the humanities, especially, to obtain a PhD—to become a doctor in your field of knowledge—is to adopt the refrain “I don’t have any marketable skills.” Many academics have no choice but to keep teaching—the only thing they feel equipped to do—even without fair pay or job security. Academic institutions are incentivized to keep adjuncts “doing what they love”—but there’s additional pressure from peers and mentors who’ve become deeply invested in the continued viability of the institution. Many senior academics with little experience of the realities of the contemporary market explicitly and implicitly advise their students that the only good job is a tenure-track academic job. When I failed to get an academic job in 2011, I felt soft but unsubtle dismay from various professors upon telling them that I had chosen to take a high school teaching job to make ends meet. It

When we protect our children from excessive control, outsized competition, and persistent academic pressure, and choose instead to commit to nurturing them with warmth, clear limits, firm consequences, and a delight in their potential and uniqueness, then our children are free to return to their essential task—the development of a sense of self, sufficiently robust to weather the inevitable ups and downs of a lifetime.

Youths sharing antisocial tendencies and lacking close family bonds and expectations of academic success may find social identity in a gang. As group identity develops, conformity pressures and deindividuation increase (Staub, 1996). Self-identity diminishes as members give themselves over to the group, often feeling a satisfying oneness with the others. The frequent result is social contagion—group-fed arousal, disinhibition, and polarization. As gang expert Arnold Goldstein (1994) observed, until gang members marry out, age out, get a job, go to prison, or die, they hang out.

Toughness is about accurately reading these signals—knowing what your body is saying and being able to decide whether or not to respond. It’s not that we have to give in to every craving, every signal. Some might be wrong. Others (e.g., the urge to eat sweets) may be a remnant from a past when calories were much harder to come by. Reading your feelings and emotions helps give you the ability to choose whether to give them attention, simply let them pass by, or utilize them for motivation. When testing how individuals work in high-pressure situations, researchers out of Spain found that people could use the anxiety that came along with pressure to their advantage. They could persist longer at a task, reach a higher level of achievement on an academic test, and even have greater job satisfaction. All thanks to the feeling of anxiety.

If children conform to the standards set by their peers, in the seventies and eighties the peer pressure for black children to keep with their own was intense. Before desegregation, “acting white” was a phrase no one had ever heard with regard to school involvement or academics. Yet in the wake of busing, it rose to become one of the most hurtful insults one black student could level at another. Talking white, dressing white, being enthusiastic about anything “white” was forsaking one’s own. For the thirty-eight black students at Vestavia, there was the black cafeteria table and there were the other cafeteria tables, and it was one or the other. There was no going back and forth.

And for all the progress, there is still societal pressure for women to keep an eye on marriage from a young age. When I went to college, as much as my parents emphasized academic achievement, they emphasized marriage even more. They told me that the most eligible women marry young to get a “good man” before they are all taken. I followed their advice and throughout college, I vetted every date as a potential husband (which, trust me, is a sure way to ruin a date at age nineteen).

Clifford” is an important psychedelic researcher, group leader, and writer. He is currently writing a book of personal essays. Student days at the University of California at San Diego were a whirlwind blending of 1960s’ issues with the academic pressure necessary to enter postgraduate training of some sort. My personal choices were between psychology and medicine. My introduction to psychedelics had convinced me of their value. I was taking a biology course to prepare for medical school, and we were studying the development of the chick embryo. After the first meeting of the one-quarter-long course, I realized that in order to stay alert, a tiny dose of LSD could be useful. With that in mind, I licked a small, but very potent, tablet emblazoned with the peace sign before every class. This produced a barely noticeable brightening of colors and created a generalized fascination with the course and my professor, who was otherwise uninteresting to me. Unfortunately, when finals came around, my health disintegrated and I missed the final exam. The next day I called my professor and begged for mercy. She said, “No problem, come to my lab.” “When shall we schedule this?” She suggested immediately. With some dismay, I agreed that I would meet her within an hour. I reached into the freezer and licked the almost exhausted fragment of the tablet I had used for class. I decided that there was so little left I might as well swallow it all. At

There is another, bleaker reason why Korea has little reason to fear that other countries will try to emulate the K-pop export model: the star-making process is so unpleasant that there are not many countries whose aspiring starts would put up with it. Korean youth, meanwhile, are used to intense masochistic academic pressure, extreme discipline, constant criticism, and zero sleep.

And that—Bella’s overweening blandness—as much as the guilty-pleasure rescue fantasy, may explain the series’ appeal: Twilight’s heroine is so insipid, so ordinary, so clumsy, so Not Hot. Isn’t that great? Think about it: what a relief that must be for girls who feel constant pressure to be physically, socially, and academically perfect! Bella does not spend two hours with a flatiron, ace her calculus test, score the winning goal in her lacrosse match, then record a hit song. Bella does not spout acidly witty dialogue. Bella does not wear $200 jeans on her effortlessly slim hips.

Academic freedom does allow for protest. Students should protest and argue about positions with which they disagree. But academic freedom does not imply that differences of opinion may be voiced via taunts, nor does it suggest that intimidation is a legitimate and productive means to affect change. Academic freedom does not mean that students should be pressured to avoid unique and difficult educational opportunities because others impugn them.

Leisure ”If you are losing your leisure, you may be losing your soul”- Logan Pearsall Smith Children these days have a huge academic burden to bear; couple that with loads of homework and they hardly find any time for leisure. Parents should try not to make the home another school by putting too much pressure on studies. While it’s great to have outings with the entire family every couple of months or so, they only provide a temporary relief to built-up tensions.  Making time everyday for some leisure activity is very important. It is during such activity that children open up about their experiences during the day.

While most research has focused on the value of maternal warmth, there is a growing body of evidence indicating that the warmth and acceptance shown by fathers, who are generally less involved in daily childcare, make a significant contribution to their children’s (especially their teenagers’) well-being. Feeling accepted by Dad appears to be particularly important when it comes to grades and conduct.7 This may be because a child has fewer interactions with Dad, so that each one takes on a heightened meaning, or because father’s approval tends to be more conditional, depending on how well the adolescent has performed. In any event, a father’s warmth and acceptance are strong predictors of academic success, social competence, and a low incidence of conduct problems in adolescence.8

Upon arriving at the peak of the mountain what you see are several other peaks that require continued climbing.

Self-Awareness Assessing our feelings, interests, values, and strengths; maintaining self-confidence. Self-Management Regulating emotions to handle stress, control impulses, and persevere in overcoming obstacles Social Awareness Understanding different perspectives and empathizing with others; recognizing and appreciating similarities and differences; using family, school, and community resources effectively Relationship Skills Maintaining healthy relationships based on cooperation; resisting inappropriate social pressure; preventing, managing, and resolving interpersonal conflicts; seeking help when needed Responsible Decision Making Using a variety of considerations, including ethical, academic, and community-related standards to make choices and decisions

But for the most part things that are marginalized are left to fend for themselves and develop their own resources. Marginalized people have done this for thousands of years and develop their own culture, diet, customs, and artwork. Marginalized individuals in society develop freethinking, unlimited by social pressures and academic controls.

The more pressure we feel, the more we tend to stick to our old routines – even when these routines caused the problems and the stress in the first place. This is known as the tunnel effect (Mullainathan and Shafir 2013). But Mullainathan and Shafir, who examined this phenomenon thoroughly, also found a way out of it: Change is possible when the solution appears to be simple.

When it came my turn, I spoke of academic and familial pressures and Asian emasculation. She’d nodded as I wrapped up the perfunctory revelations and told me that she “lived entirely with people who identified as hyphenated in college” and therefore “got it.

Influential educational school in Abu Dhabi: Reach British School Selecting schools that speak about the type of education you want to impart to your kid is an important decision. Like all other difficult decisions that parenthood brings with it, this one too cannot be decided based on one impulsive thought. School is an important part of any child's growth. They learn, they giggle, and grow into beautiful individuals. Thus, schools build them into responsible beings. However, finding the right school can be research-heavy and hectic. International education in the United Arab Emirates is not cheap, and this adds to an extra load of pressure on deciding parents. Yet, Abu Dhabi is known to host an excellent range of international schools that are somewhat budget-friendly. The British International School is one such example, they surely secure a place in the list of best schools in Abu Dhabi. Why choose Reach British School? Reading through different curriculums, and googling into millions of school websites is a part of this decision-making. You look for that spark, one that you look for in any relationship. Yes, choosing a school is the beginning of a life-long relationship, an important part of your child’s life. This article will push you towards decision making, as it lists the points on why you should choose Reach British School. The following reasons will convince you that it fits into the best schools in Abu Dhabi. English proficiency The staff is filled with native English-speaking teachers. Thus, they bring with them, years of experience in the language field and absolute English proficiency. Being native English speakers, they can showcase experience in the UK or other international schools. Excellent facilities Schooling is a part of a child's overall growth, and there is more to it than just academics. Being one of the best schools in Abu Dhabi, they support an exciting curriculum. It includes sports, arts, academic subjects, and a bunch of other extra-curricular activities. High Academic standards and behavioral expectations A child grows into a successful human being, who is also a responsible citizen. Thus, the school sets a strong focus on the academic depth and the behavioral patterns of the child. They ensure that your child reaches their fullest potential in a safe and secure environment. Student progress tracking You will get a chance to be deeply involved in your child's progress. The school will provide regular reports on your child's growth that will give you a fair idea about their needs, likes, and dislikes. Thus, you can take an active part in their academic progress, social and emotional well-being. Secondary scholarships The school funds a scholarship program to motivate students to achieve their dreams. The program attracts bright minds and pushes them to reach their potential in the fields they are passionate about. Amazing learning Not just the staff, but also the environment of the school will enable your child to go through an amazing learning experience. Your child will be motivated and encouraged to perform better as that is the base for amazing learning. Endnotes Reach British School wants to let your child shine, in the truest sense possible. Keeping the tag of being one of the best schools in Abu Dhabi, is difficult. Thus, they aspire to be better every day and sculpt new souls into responsible adults, while protecting their innocence and childhood.

When Lillian (Holt) argues that leadership steals your spirit, she means that institutional pressures change you; they erode your courage, passion and humour and wear you down so that important things don't get named and get overtaken by the trivial. In the following excerpts from one interview I undertook with her, Lillian elaborates why Indigenous Australians find it hard to speak out. There is a systemic blockage. Something happens to Aboriginal people who work in hierarchies, whether bureaucracy or academic… a bit like my own story of climbing the ladder of success. You get to the top and find it bereft, bereft of passion, bereft of intuition, of emotion. 'For God's sake don't talk about emotion in a place like this!

45. Remember that advanced placement doesn’t necessarily have to mean early graduation. Our two older children were talented in math and science, and easily completed more than the required number of secondary credits in sciences and humanities well before their peers. We drove our oldest son two hours away to live in a dorm at a state university the week before his 18th birthday, and our second-born graduated from high school when she was 15. Her college adviser mapped a plan where she could have finished her PhD in nursing by the time she was 21! Academically, they were fine. But socially and emotionally, it was tough to transition to the rigors of full-time college life (even junior college) one or two years before their traditionally-schooled friends. Because of that, their younger brother, a scholar in his own right, was not given the option to graduate early. Although he was frustrated with this limitation, it has alleviated a lot of pressure the other kids were forced to deal with before they had reached appropriate emotional maturity.

Writing is not the memorialization of ideas. Writing distills, crafts, and pressure-tests ideas—it creates ideas.

Students who pursue a degree driven by external pressure from their parents, usually experience a disconnect in their potential and academic path.

Cultural expectations often shape students' attitudes towards education. Many students underachieve because they feel pressured by societal norms that may devalue academic success.