School Stress

Is school just another pound of stress on teenage students? Lately all that has been talked about is how much homework students have a night, the amount of studying to be done each weekend, and how students will do anything to pass their classes. Teachers have gone to the extreme in assigning work each day, as if students don’t have six or seven other classes to attend.

Not only do students have work for other classes, but over half of students do extra-curricular activities for the school and outside of school. Lately going to bed early is around midnight because a normal student stays up until morning trying to finish last night’s homework. The negative effects of this are sleeping in class and missing important curriculum, which then leads to confusion and being behind. Due to all this stress to pass school students have become experts at cheating. Cheating is not a good habit, but it has become necessary for students to do to pass. Copying last nights homework, or looking over at a neighbor’s test answer is much easier than cramming in all your work and not putting your best effort forth.

If the option to cheat is there, any student is going to take advantage. Guilt is not an outcome of cheating to student because they feel that school has become about passing, not actually learning the important material. We are taught growing up that how you do in school will effect the rest of our lives, now as if that isn’t stressful enough, the standards have been raised over the top to pass. Every teacher can admit that we learn things in school that will never be used outside of school. Tell me why we haven’t learned to pay bills, or write a check, or balance money properly, but we have learned to find the volume of a hyperbola, and measure the mass of a salt water pipet. We should be learning information that will benefit us in the future.

I believe that everyone is extremely intelligent in their own ways, but if you judge the intelligence of a fish by how fast it can climb a tree, you won’t get much out of it. That saying applies to how students are feeling dumb, stupid, and not applying themselves because they aren’t intelligent in one subject, such as math, or science. If students were given the opportunity to show their intelligence in the classes they were interested in, than I think they would be more motivated in school. Going to school every day for a third of your life should not be dreaded, but should be enjoyed, and I think it’s time for a change in schools.