Pick Up The Overachievers: The Secret Lives Of Driven Kids Devised By Alexandra Robbins Issued As Text

in the DC metro area, working in Bethesda where the school mentioned is located, and having attended an even more intense magnet school in the area less thanyears before the book was written.
. . This book spoke to me, I can't even PRETEND to guess if this is a universal experience, but I could personally relate to many aspects of the students profiled.
What I didn't see in myself, I saw in my classmates,

I hope teachers and parents read this book and understand the pressures that kids put on themselves, A Year Later .

It's close to the end of my senior year of high school, it's about time for me to really decide where I want to go, and it's been a year since I read The Overachievers yet this book is still sticking in my head.
Of all the books that I've read, this is probably one of the most important, Honestly, I don't quite know why because it just gets me so righteously angry whenever I think about my own college application experiences in terms of this book curse the Early Decision admission track and curse Vanderbilt for having not one but TWO Early Decision tracks instead of an Early Action one but this book was still so relevant to me.
I'm so glad that I picked this to read in English my junior year,

Actual

I had to read The Overachievers for my AP English class.
We were given a list of seventeen books and were told to choose which book we wanted to read the most.
I chose this book because, being what my friends call an overachiever, I wanted to read about myself,

The book wasn't quite like that though: Alexandra Robbins, the author, followed several high school to collegeage students who are considered overachievers by their peers.
Reading about these people made me ever grateful for one reason: I'm not an overachiever like these students,

My gosh, talk about stress! This book centers on the kind of people who would kill themselves if they didn't get into Harvard or would curl into a ball and flood Earth with their tears if they got a dreaded B.
This book is so good because not only does Robbins discuss the overachiever culture and its causes and effects but also how to successfully dismantle this culture.
She goes into detail about how students' stress and pressure come from multiple sources e, g. class rank, parental involvement/helicopter parenting, college rankings, AP class and extracurricular overload and how everyone students, parents, counselors, even colleges can contribute to lessen the burden.


I would highly recommend this book to anyone who knows or who is an overachiever because this book, despite being several years old, rings as true as ever.
This book represents a very small percentage of American teenagers fun read and while the story is almostyears old I still see some of these traits and attributes in my students.
Set in a time before everyone owned a cell phone and AOL AIM was king i genuinely liked this bookwhich surprised me.
i'm not a nonfiction reader, but it's quite easy to get wrapped up in our crew of student's lives, the only things i didn't particularly enjoy were the authors interjections, as i felt they were too long, but that might be because where Robbin succeeds in creatively telling the students story's, she fails at keeping up the momentum in her own sections.
A few of them here and there interested me, but not enough of them for me to ignore their somewhat negative impact on the book overall.

Overall, this book was a good way of digesting the over competitive nature of schools today, while also especially as a teen empathizing with the students and further understand your own feelings toward school.
Reading this book as a high school student meant a lot of me nodding my head and saying "Same!" a few times each chapter.
The content of the book itself was great, and honestly more people need to read this book because people don't seem to truly get the stress kids are under these days.
My only issue was Robbins has this style of writing that to me is a little too verbose, I found myself skipping paragraphs and having to force myself to come back and read them because I just found them boring.
However, overall this is a book I would recommend, and I enjoyed reading most of it, Robbins' nonfiction reads like a novel, Her characters, real life high school students, tell the story, which Robbins validates with her research, sprinkled between the anecdotes.
As the parent of a high school junior who attends a school much like Whitman, I was deeply interested in the subject matter, and as a former school counselor and adjunct professor, I appreciated the thoroughness of Robbins' research.
This book should be required reading for high school parents, particularly if their children are collegebound, It's wellwritten and easy to read, yet it delivers its message clearly and beautifully, yk what. i actually really enjoyed this book so im gonna add it to my yearly goal, this book was actually so fun to read and i was so invested in their lives, teamjulie tho when it comes to derek I chose this book for our book club, and I'm eager to see what elementary teachers and parents think of this book.
I was impressed! Robbins follows several students from one highachieving school and connects their concerns and struggles with education issues: NCLB, SAT and ACT testing, the whole testprep industry recess and the competition for preschool admission and how schools' schedules are a mismatch to teenagers' sleep patterns.
Her commentary is topnotch! I read fiction for

character, so I was drawn in by these amazing kids who are trying so hard to juggle their lives, and have a life.
I recommend this to anyone who knows a child! Alexandra Robbins' The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids is a poignant, nonfiction work that touches upon the modern competitive education system, which has seemingly gone out of control.
Rather than earning grades for learning, students are obtaining artificial grades through cheating, and even resorting to nonprescribed medications to facilitate their study habits in order to get into their dream college.
During Alexandra'syear high school reunion, she gathers a group of her friends' high school experiences and puts them in her book.
It includes stereotypes such as the overachieving scholar, the popular athlete, those who are can never seem to fulfill their parents' expectations, and others who struggle to put on a flawless and wellrounded facade.
These high school students engage themselves in numerous extracurricular activities, and also manage to balance seventeen AP classes throughout high school all in attempt to get into their dream college.


The Overachievers is an enticing story which combines the conflicts of both man vs, society and man vs. himself. For example, Julie, a young student who portrays the typical overachieving scholar, gives her best effort to do extraordinarily well in school to get into her dream college, Stanford.
She faces fierce competition among the other overachievers at school, and feels the need to maintain their perfect impressions of her.
On the other hand, one of Julie's peers, AP Frank, feels pressured to fulfill his mother's harsh expectations, He is important to the novel because he shows that the lack of time and energy required to live up to these expectations, both shared by the students and their parents, is a product of the pressure of trying to live up to societal standards.
Other overachievers compete to maintain a meticulous academic record in order to be accepted into a prestigious university, Each student invests hours of his or her personal time studying for each test, which slowly wears away at the character's sanity as they try to make room for a social life as well.
With every club activity and study session he or she participates in, the student begins to feel the stress as they watch his/her time and energy dwindle to almost nothing.
In retrospect, the driving force behind each character's actions is in response to the pressure and stress that acts as a constant motif throughout the novel.
Julie and AP Frank are merely a few examples of the victims who suffer from the excruciating standards set by society and their parents in a desperate attempt to be accepted into an ideal college institution.
College acts as the overpowering symbol of success that drives each character into a dismal and debilitating whirlwind of stress.
However, Robbins exhibits a crucial theme in her book: Getting into a prestigious university does not determine whether one will be successful or not.
She is reminding all high school students who constantly feel anxiety of getting into a namebrand college that school should be a place for learning not a place for competing to be "number one.
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Overall, The Overachievers is a compelling book that I was recommended to read in English class.
It attracted me because I was able to relate to the high school experience in the story, This book has helped me constantly remind myself that grades are not an accurate judgment of what the potential an average student like I may have, and that school is just an environment to learn and grow.
Robbins' diarystyle writing makes the book feel a lot more personal, as if the reader were reading a friend's journal about the everyday stress from school.
In between entries, Robbins intervenes and provides startling statistics on the various aspects of modern education, such as kids resorting to drugs to attain better performance in school and suicide rates.
She also gives her opinion of what she thinks of the current education system bad and inefficient, I would definitely recommend this book to all high school students today especially juniors and seniors who are looking for an easytoread book to relate to.
Robbins' accessible style of writing keeps the audience captivated to want to continue reading on, The Overachievers is by far one of my favorite books earning a rating of five out of five.
I really really hated this book, This was a book about overachievers, and It was quite boring for me, The contents were made of students constantly in stress, because of their academics, It handeled the big problems in the education culture, and I thought that the theme itself was quite interesting.
However the book was just too long, You know that the students are having a hard time, they are in stress, but that just goes on for more than half of the book.
I understand the big education problems the book handeled, but it wasn't something enjoyable to read, I felt that the book goes on forever, and that may be the reason why I didn't like it so much.
There are stuff like "I couldn't get enough of it" "impossible to put down" on the cover, I couldn't relate to that at all, Took a heck of a long time to finish but what an inspiring read that changed the way I think about all types of education and how we as a society view achievements and brand names.
I loved how the author interviewed REAL students from all types of backgrounds and socioeconomic levels, I heavily related to the mindset of the overachiever and the blindness that comes with constantly wanting to be the best at everything and the damage it can cause as a growing adult trying to find an identity beyond your resume and school.
Loved this book and would recommend to anyone who likes a mix of investigative analysis and random teen drama in a nonfiction.
The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids, a nonfiction work by Alexandra Robbins, is a book I chose to read because it was a requirement for our English Honors class.
Students usually groan at the thought of reading a book because it is a school requirement, but I found The Overachievers to be quite an interesting read.
In it, Robbins traces the thoughts and lives of several overachieving students, namely juniors and seniors, from Whitman High School located in Bethesda, Maryland, who face various dilemmas that range from being emotional and mental to physical.
Most of these problems have been acquired through stress from the rigorous classes and extracurricular activities they take on, which are directly correlated to admissions into top tier universities.
The desire to be accepted into the most prestigious colleges of the nation is derived from either the students ambition to become successful in life or from parental pressure.


I found the central conflict in the novel to be man vs, man. The whole overachieving system, according to Robbins, originates from the ambitions of people to come out at the top for people to be recognized publicly as the number one in whatever they encounter.
But since there are only a handful of number one positions open, everyone scrambles wildly to grasp that title, often engaging in unethical behavior just to achieve it.
Dishonesty is a major motif of the book students guiltlessly use it to satisfy their own or their parents ambitions, which usually constitutes of achieving the highest marks possible, whether it be in academics or in sports.
Some students, or parents even, go so far as to attempt to sabotage others chances for socalled “success, ” Consequently, a students intellect cant be judged based on the grades that he or she receives in school, Another result of this recurring dishonesty is that being successful in todays overachieving society is no longer dependent upon an individuals genuine hunger for knowledge and being able to fulfill that hunger by learning well purely for personal benefit.
Therefore, the theme that I gathered from this book is that the concerns of overachieving students or their parents to become “successful” by todays societal standards will often hinder their true desires.
An example in the book is AP Frank, a graduate of Whitman High School, whose overbearing mother doesnt take into account her sons hopes for his own future.
I believe that parents like that thrust a life upon their own children that they wish they had thus, children are not really viewed as other, separate human beings, but rather symbolize a second chance at life.


Robbins writes the book in a documentary style, often interrupting the stories of the students lives with her own commentary and carefully researched statistics, as well as comments from students from other schools around the United States.
A reader might also get the impression that the novel is a compilation of thirdperson diary entries, with Robbins providing researched statistics that are directly related to the events of the students lives.
What really sets The Overachievers aside from other typical research projects is the emotion and passion that Robbins puts into the subject.
For example, it is evident from her writing style that she holds distaste for the No Child Left Behind Act, which she believes contributes to the stressful environment that schools have become.


The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids is a book I would definitely recommend to all the overachievers in America, especially the children under age twelve who are currently being pressured by their parents to learn material far beyond the typical level of learning at their age.
Since the novel is quite easy to read, I mainly recommend it to young learners, because children of younger ages have the tendency to more loyally obey their parents wishes, no matter how strenuous.
And eventually, they grow into the habit of acting accordingly with the intentions of their parents, Although reading this book might prove to be a disillusioning experience, I believe it to be better that children know in advance what kind of society they are growing up in.
This novel is also a good read for high school students, who can connect to the overachievers on a personal level.
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