The Myth of Maturity by Terri Apter

Author:Terri Apter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

GOOD STUDENTS, LATE LEARNERS

Star performers in high school are in many ways to be envied. They gain their teachers’ respect and affection. They bask in their parents’ admiration. Their day-to-day lives, both at home and school, are easier. Parents tend to give more freedom to adolescent daughters and sons who are good students than to those who struggle with their grades. Parents have fewer quarrels with teenagers who make the honor roll. The A-student has a far better chance of negotiating curfews or an increase in allowance. Parents also tend to buy high flyers more things: Designer jackets and flat-screened computers and new cars are sometimes rewards for good grades. Doing well in school creates a halo effect, as though the ability to get As were proof of overall worth.

The rewards of being a good high-school student are high, but a strong track record also pumps up the pressure. Looking as though they are sailing through without effort, these star performers are under strain. Christa is seen by her mother, her high-school classmates, and her teachers as “blessed with talent and charm.” Christa sees herself as “sometimes lucky, but mostly a fraud.” During the years of earning grades and taking exams, she faced the same pressure her friends faced, but while Christa came through with the trophies, her friends learned to accept a mix of successes and failures. They learned to mess up and move on.

Christa knows perfection is fragile. “Things just clicked for me in high school, especially during the last two years. My SAT scores—they were a fluke—but they set up everything else. My senior year was an act I don’t think I’ll ever be able to repeat. Those weeks around graduation, I kept thinking, ‘Life will never be as good as this again.’ And I kept getting these waves of panic because time wasn’t going to stand still. It didn’t matter how much I wanted it to.”

Young people who feel dissatisfied in some way with their high-school years and their teenage persona will be looking out for opportunities to grow and change, but the “perfect girl” is on the lookout to re-create her high-school world. She does not want to change, she wants to make sure things stay the same. When this cannot be done, she feels exposed as a failure.

In her freshman year at a prestigious East Coast college, Christa finds herself among a clutch of bright people and believes she has slipped in by mistake, that her entire run of success had been a mistake. She remarks ruefully: “Being accepted by this place is probably the worst thing that could have happened to me.” Here, she does not rank among the best tennis players. Her old study habits leave her far behind many others. Studying for college courses seems totally different from her learning process in high school. It comes as a shock that she cannot complete the preparation for her classes, that her language teachers expect so much vocabulary mastered each week she does not see how anyone else manages it.

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