Peer Pressure

High school for me was the time when I grew the most in my life. I went to high school in Fairfax County, located in Northern Virginia. Our county is very well known for its academic excellence and its reputation probably played a large part in how I go into UNCW.

It is a large county holding more than one million residents with more than twenty high schools in the area. Its location is only ten miles out side of Washington D.C., so as you can imagine, the county is full of families with parents in power. For example, my father worked in the Pentagon under Clinton as the Assistant Secretary for the Navy and my best friend’s parents both worked for the CIA. As interesting as this sounds, growing up in an area like this made being a teenager pretty intense.There was a lot of pressure growing up in an area with so much money. When kids in my school got their drivers licenses, no one had to drive their mom¹s van; parents bought their kids BMWs, Mustangs and Audis.

As we got older, the money starting being spent on things less innocent like drugs and alcohol, not to mention about ninety percent of my friends smoked cigarettes.I realized after I left, that all the peer pressure in high school is one of the biggest challenges for a teenager to face. More importantly, it can be a huge factor in a student’s life including on their academic responsibilities and their health. One possible solution to would be to divide high school into two separate schools. One school designed for the ninth and tenth graders and the other for eleventh and twelfth graders. I think that the separation between students would create for a more balanced environment for students to learn in.

The difference between ninth grade and twelfth is very different. From starting to get to know yourself to finding out what you need to do to go off to college and be on your own for the first time. It doesn’t make sense to me that these groups of people would benefit from one another. It seems to be more of a distraction and a bad ground for setting expectations.

If there were two separate schools younger teens would not be exposed to some of the things that teenagers who are older might be into such as drugs and sex. Academically, this may be beneficial as well. The school for ninth and tenth graders could get better prepared for eleventh and twelfth grade and these students could get better prepared for college. I think the two schools would serve as a better way to move teens along through their high school careers so they can better receive what they need from classes without as much peer pressure.