Relations with classmates

Relations with classmates become more important when students are teenagers. Classmates are people with whom teenagers spend a lot of their time at school.
Experience of communicating with peers is vital for future life, because after school teenagers will live in adult world and behave with others how they learnt to do at school.
When students were younger, they were satisfied with being among others. But when they are at teen age, the most important thing is to be accepted by class and to find their place in system of relations.
Some teenagers can find their place easily. For some it is a problem, they are not satisfied with attitude of peers. Such things should be corrected. If teenagers have good relations with parents, they should ask them for help to show their mistakes. Or they can ask school psychologist.

Reasons for not satisfaction can be the following:
- teenagers have not true, exaggerated opinion of their qualities and expect others to agree with this; they can behave too superior to peers who do not like this;

- teenagers can have exaggerated vision of their drawbacks in appearance; this make them shy and reserved;

- teenagers are too different from others, for example, in values or grades.

If teenagers are satisfied with relations, it makes big influence on many things. They feel secure and calm, they are not afraid to express their opinion, and their opinion is respected.

Our group think that to be a good classmate you must:
- listen to all opinion carefully;
- do not interrupt;
- help if somebody needs help;
- to be tolerant;
- do not lose head in conflicts and not to start blaming.

If teenagers have problems with relations or are not accepted, they feel worried, frustrated. Grades can become lower, because they do not care about study or are afraid to answer at school, to do mistakes and look funny.
Some teenagers can break discipline or be rude with teachers to raise their status.
One of the worst statuses is isolation. For teenagers it is very difficult to stay alone and if class does not accept them, they find another group to be with. Very often it is a group which makes bad influence but teenagers will be happy that the group accepted them. They will happily do what other group members do, smoke, drink, take drugs or break law.
In class relations a lot depends on teachers and parents, they should teach students to be good classmates. If somebody has problems, they should do everything to help and take measures.
It is very good for relations in class when whole class takes part in different activities, like going to nature together, have class celebrations.
Dmitriy (R)