It is generally stated that the way a child grows up depends on his/her school friends. In other words, friends influence each other the most. Some people might disagree with this statement by saying that students are more affected by teachers than friends. However, I firmly believe that at school the most influential people are peers. For one thing, students spend more time with their friends than teachers. In addition, most students can find common language with classmates, while it is much harder to do so with teachers. To start with, the vast majority of students tend to spend more time with classmates at school. This is largely because they are together whenever they study, rest and eat. On the other hand, teachers do not have so much leisure to stay together with their students all the time. To illustrate, I know one friend who used to hang around with "bad friends", though he had the most respected classroom teacher. Despite all the efforts made by his teacher, he ended up going to jail because of his friends. This example illustrates that peers influence a person much more than teachers. Moreover, many students are incapable of finding a common language with teachers because of age gap. Though there are some exceptions, most teachers tend to be at least 10 years older than students. Therefore, both teachers and students find it extremely difficult to communicate with each other properly. In contrast, school friends are approximately the same age, which makes it easier for them to hang around together. For instance, I like talking to my friends whenever I have trouble or problems. They listen to me carefully and after we can discuss possible solutions. On the contrary, I do not find enough courage to talk about the same things with my teachers because most of them are much older than me. It seems to me that they will not understand my problems properly. To sum up, I would like to reiterate that it is inevitable that classmates are far more influential than teachers because more time is spent together and they are approximately the same age. |