Student Stereotypes Essay

I have dealt with stereotyping, in the form of name calling. The majority of the names were as follows: nerd, geek, and teacher’s pet. Stereotypes have long existed everywhere, but teens hear most of these in school, and can affect the students in negative ways. I have observed what kind of stereotypes are labeled, whether it’s for race, clique, or looks. Society has made it acceptable to stereotype people in the worst way, and I plan to expose it. From what I have observed through anonymous surveys and from articles that talk about the same topic is that all these stereotypes revolve around school and the students in them. In his 2009 news article, “How a Self-Fulfilling Stereotype Can Drag Down Performance”,Shankar Vedantam states, “Colleges have long known that women and minorities typically underperform relative to their SAT scores.” This piece of evidence describes how colleges stereotype women and minorities by saying they’ll score lower than the average man. The minorities then do not want to
Most students think that intelligence are inherent from the race of a student. In Vedantam’s article, he states that by telling test takers that Asians would score higher than the test takers depresses the performance of the students. This shows that by using race to represent the aptitude of a person, students then feel insignificant and thus do not get better. Students also have to deal with the expectation of following a stereotype. A good example is telling a person that they will be valedictorian because of a semester of good grades stresses the student, thus affect not only how they perform in school, but how they act outside of campus too. In one of the surveys that I had taken for this project, a male freshman who was stereotyped as the smart kid feels stressed out to be the best, causing him to sleep less and become less productive. Thus, stereotypes can damage the aptitude of a