Suburbs

Suburb (n.) - a district lying immediately outside a city or town, esp. a smaller residential community.

Having lived in a suburb for the majority of my life, I have only a fraction of the desire many teenagers have to leave the "Burlingame Bubble." As Louis Simpson says in "In the Suburbs," there is no way out; lives are wasted and spent in a boring, middleclass life. I do agree with these people when they say that the suburbs don't expose us to the "real world," but I believe it protects us. I don't think many of us are old and mature enough to experience the real world; well, at least I don't think that I am.

Then again, adults think teenagers are ready for a lot of things far beyond their maturity level. Not only do they expect us to change our lifestyles from a safe environment that we grow up in to a completely different one, but they expect us to know what we want out of life (declaring college majors). Personally, I don't think I will be ready to leave the "Burlingame Bubble" for an extended amount of time to attend college, but since society deems us ready, I will do my best to prepare.

College Expectations

Colleges expect way too much out of its students almost to the point of ridiculousness. It makes me upset that to get into any sort of competitive college, we need to be taking every AP class offered along with participating in ten different extra-curricular activities. They say that they want well-rounded individuals that will add to more than just the numbers of the school, but is that really what they want? Let's take Stanford for example. If you look at the academic profiles of the last few admitted classes, each student probably has a 4.5+ GPA, 2300 SAT scores and the ASB president at their respective school. My point is that colleges can't expect us to be well-rounded individuals if all we're focusing on is things to put on their college application. With such high competition, all we're doing in our high school years are studying, studying and studying with some E.C.s thrown in a couple times a week. Is it really worth giving up developing social skills and having fun just to get into Stanford? No; high school should be something that we all look back upon with positive memories and a smile knowing that we could be real teenagers.

Presentations

Today during presentations, I enjoyed Alessandra's group's discussion regarding reason versus passion. This is something I have always kept in the back of the mind, but I never really took the time to analyze and decypher what it really meant. The Greek tragedy Antigone displays the balance between reason versus passion as this concept relates a lot to the difference between doing what the law tells you and doing what one thinks is right. Antigone decides to do what she thinks is right by burying her brother, which opposes what the law told her what was right. She chose passion over reason in this instance, and it results in her death.
I like to find a balance between reason and passion in my life; reason to be accepted into society and passion to make life meaningful. When I make a decision of any kind, I usually think about reason first, as it generally would be affecting people other than myself. Then I look at how it may benefit or hurt me in the short or long run. I think that I am more of a reasonable rather than passionate decision-maker, though I try not to think about myself in the process.