Look around your own classroom, you will see hardworking, focused students, and you may also find a few students who are not interested in anything to do with class or school. They just come to class and fill space without caring about what is going on. They check out of the classroom, even though they are still at their desk or a lab table. There may be some reasons for this behavior such as family influence, peer influence, and just generally being a person experiencing life between the ages of 13 and 18. Well, it's actually pretty normal behavior. One of the influences on academic engagement is your own family. If your parents are interested in your academic life and have the time to do so, you are more likely to be interested in academics too. Generally, when parents or caregivers are not interested in the success or failure of their children, the child will not care about school either and may perform poorly just because he or she doesn't really care. Your fellow students can have an impact too. Some kids may say “I'm too cool to care about school.” If you think they are cool because of their attitude about school and follow the same path, you will quickly stop caring about school too. When I was hanging out with some troublesome kids in ninth grade, a favorite teacher of mine warned me that “birds of a feather flock together.” She was reminding me to get back on track and stay focused. Teenagers may even check out due to a biological reason. The brain's thinking skills are not fully developed until the age of twenty-five, so you may not care about what's going on in the classroom as a fifteen year-old but you might when you are older. The conclusion is missing. Write a concluding paragraph for this essay.