High School Life Essay

High school is a place where young teens learn to become mature and responsible. It is a place where students get trained to take on bigger challenges in life. Obstacles such as college. From my own personal experiences, high school didn’t seem that way. Students were more concerned about getting a passing grade then about what they were taught. They would even cheat their way out of high school. This would prepare them for college. My freshman year of high school, I was in a totally different place and it seemed quite interesting and fascinating at first. As the year passed by, I started to notice the techniques students were using to pass classes. It was something I didn’t see while I was in junior high school. Students were cheating on almost all the tests. They would bring little print-out cheat sheets to class to use on the tests. Hardly anyone got caught by the teacher. When students did get caught, all they would do is deny and usually the teacher would just let them get away with it. As Casey Banas wrote in â€Å"Why Students Are Turned Off?† â€Å"I sometimes estimated that half to two-thirds of a class cheated on a given test,’ Glanz said. ‘Worse, I’ve encountered students who feel no remorse about cheating but are annoyed that a teacher has confronted them on their actions† (Banas 659). Cheating seemed like the popular thing to do and if you didn’t cheat you would be considered real foolish.. Everyone in the class knew what was going on and it was basically a whole class effort to cheat. Students would discuss what the answers were before taking the test and give each other opinions on how to cheat safely. When the test came back, every student in the class would have a real close score, but the teachers didn’t seem to notice anything at all. Most of the students that go into a certain class usually wouldn’t even know what went on even after the class has ended. As Casey Banas wrote: â€Å"The teacher is convinced that the subject matter is worth knowing, but the student may not agree. Many students, Glanz said, are not convinced they need to know what teachers teach; but they believe good grades are needed to get into college†¦.(Banas 659) These kids could literally just sit there for forty-five minutes daydreaming. I find that many students feel the classes are extremely boring and is of no use to them in the future. I always used to ask myself â€Å"Why do I need to know this stuff for?†. When students feel this way, they don’t do the work because they don’t think they need it in life. When I used to go to high school, my whole class would get assignments and home works and about almost three-fourths of the class didn’t do it. Instead they would wait until someone who was paying attention and did do the assignment to come along and let them copy the assignment. They would do it in way that the teacher wouldn’t even know by slightly changing some words here and there. After that, that paper gets passed around the entire class to the students who didn’t do the assignment and everyone would have a slightly different paper. This way all the students hand in the assignment and will get a passing grade, but did they even learn anything?. These techniques that were used in the high school that I attended did work and a lot of students graduated from high school using these techniques. I, myself, used these techniques and got through my freshman year. As time went on I found that high school was really boring so I decided to cut and eventually dropped-out of school. These students got good grades and did all the assignments, but the truth is, they didn’t learn much at all. They can have a 85 average and get into a good college, but will they be prepared enough to survive college level work? I don’t think so.