The clock now stares back in a palindrome: 9:09. There are ten hours until school starts. I have already seen seven hours pass since school last ended. First, I took a math competition, then butchered a concerto at my violin lesson. By the time I found myself back at home, it was about 5:00 PM. I only lasted half an hour with homework before falling victim to that ever-evasive luxury�sleep. At 6:30, I awoke for my daily ten-minute dinner. For the next two hours, I slaved over European history notes. From the time school got out until now� or even hours from now, all I will have accomplished is an abundance of schoolwork, mostly busywork. It usually only gets completed to get me into college and keep up with competition. Overworking for school is a standard and priorities seem to have been lost in the shuffle to accomplish. For most competitive students, high school has been reduced to a superficial game.

Students today are repeatedly advised of the benefits of early college and career planning. It seems that the message has been well-planted. For many, if not most students, the only reason for putting effort into high school is to get into a selective college. Possessing ambitions toward a college education seems virtuous enough� but has it gone too far? As if it could never be too early to dedicate oneself to college, new programs across the country are exposing elementary students to admissions hints, saying, �It may help to begin the process for kids as early as third grade� (Kasky). Once in high school, students stack extracurricular activities in an attempt to look �well-rounded�. Volunteer activities and leadership opportunities are often greeted with �Well, it�ll look good on college applications.� Spring scheduling leads to frustration, agony, and confusion. My 4.0 GPA so far means a class rank of about 50, hardly top of the competition. I already regret bringing down my weighted GPA with my semester photography class. Was not the purpose of high school at some time� to explore and to learn? It seems the purpose today would be better expressed as �to compete. �

Success in high school for many �accelerated pathway� students constitutes working to one�s maximum capacity. To be competitive is to pack as much into the precious 24 hours in a day as possible. Dr. David Fassler, a psychiatrist, makes the disturbing statement that �[students] actually crash and burn. [�] When we do surveys of kids in school, 25 percent of kids, one child in four, think about suicide each year� (Lin). Not only is the stress overwhelming, an equally common problem is inadequate sleep. Sadly, I am a typical example of sleep deprivation, as it is 11:11 now and I can expect to stay awake for at least another hour or two. There is a Frappuchino bottle already drained of its caffeine sitting next to my work. Tomorrow I will undoubtedly prefer sleep to class but drag myself to school anyhow. I am far from alone: Half of early-rising 10th graders given laboratory tests in a Brown University Medical School study for their "sleep latency" at 8:30 a.m. were found to be in the "pathological" range of sleepiness (Kaufman). It has been shown that sleep deprivation leads to worse performance. Yet those who deal with the sleepless nights continue to rise to the top of the competition. With the high school game comes an altered set of values. Hard work is usually not enough to succeed. Extra shortcuts and techniques must be learned�doing homework during class and only when required, sleeping in class when possible, utilizing lunch as a study hall�these are common and �innocent� enough, rather essential to today�s competition. However, even shortcuts may not provide the advantage needed to compete. Hence, many students have turned to cheating. Morning classes share test information with the later bells. Plain collaboration and old-fashioned copying are perhaps more common than ever because of this drive to excel�or at least appear to excel. Students are exhibiting a general loss of ethics.

Prioritizing and time management should to be the key to maintaining any busy schedule. However, teens� ideal priorities often fall victim to high school pursuits. One of the highest priorities for most teens is relationships, but time spent on relationships is time and focus distracted from school. It is school that usually comes out on top. Even when not in school, the prospect of school and working looms over everything. �Recent surveys of teens across the country showed that 68 percent are worried about the future, 52 percent say they are worried about getting a good job, 45 percent are working so much they are too tired to do the things they want� (Lin). What is high school worth in the long run if we are not getting what we want? We�ve all heard that higher education will eventually pay off by yielding higher-paying jobs. A more interesting and perhaps more worthwhile question is, how much will that one class A matter in the long run? How will my rough draft of this essay make a difference when I�m applying to the University of Michigan? Prioritization gains a whole new perspective from this questioning.

High school today is probably far more complex than anyone in the one-room schoolhouses could have ever imagined. In an ever-increasing state of competitiveness, the drive to get into the best colleges controls high school students, acting as an underlying ulterior motive. Doing too much for one�s own good is not only common, it is necessary for the competitor. Values have been stretched and so frequently lost that it has become easier and easier to get lost in a sea of work and perfectionism. High school has become a twisted game�yet we are still all players willingly competing. Despise the system as we may, shortcuts and pure work still combine more effectively than any form of complaint ever has. So tomorrow I will find myself at school as always�a mere player in a system.