TASK.
Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.
Students are more influenced by their teachers than by their friends.
TEST TAKER'S TASK RESPONSE.
Students, due to their relatively young mental age, are readily influenced by others' values and opinions. Despite the great impact that teachers have on them, I believe that students are more affected by their friends. I feel this way for three reasons, which I will explore in the following essay.
To begin with, we can tell it from the amount of time. Specifically, students only spend a fraction of time listening to teachers. On the contrary, they engage in social activities most of the time the rest of the day, especially with their friends. Therefore, students have more interaction with their friends and hence get more influenced by them. For instance, students would consult their senior friends on study advice and recommendation on courses. This kind of action would provide them with opinions that may help them gain better academic performance.
Secondly, teachers do not express their values to students directly. The duty of teachers is to convey knowledge, rather than to tell their audiences what to do. According to my personal experience, teachers tend to just paraphrase the contents from the textbooks and stay away from personal conversations as long as they can. As a result, students cannot straightly perceive their teachers' point of view. In short, teachers have little to do with students' values and opinions.
Admittedly, some great tutors do give positive influences on their students, but overall these influences are faint. This is because of the generation gap. Teachers are generally considerably older than students, so the circumstance under which they have grown is quite different. At the end of the day, it is impractical to follow their experiential suggestions. For instance, there was nothing like tiktok or twitter several decades before, so the form of social activities has radically changed. If you got into trouble with someone 30 years before, you could just keep away from him. But in contemporary days, physical absence is not enough. You have to stay away from him on every social media, and it is more complicated to do so.
In conclusion, since students spend more time and share common interests with their friends, students are more influenced by their friends.