The average high school teacher assigns 3.5 hours of homework per week. The typical high school student takes seven classes, so that means that they receive 24.5 hours of homework weekly.
This means that they don’t have much time to spend on extra curricular activities, or hanging out with friends of family because they are so preoccupied..
With such little time available to high school students, it’s no wonder why a majority deal with stress.
This stress is comparable to, and sometimes even worse than what an adult experiences.
In moderation, stress can be very healthy for teens. Good stress encourages competition. This makes students work harder and leads to better results in school, sports, and other things.
Dealing with stress as a teen makes it easier to manage stress as an adult.
But the problem with school nowadays is that it is promoting stress at extremely high rates.
Students have to deal with jam packed school lessons, intense amounts of homework, and assessments on the daily.
“I have at least 4 quizzes or tests a week,” sophomore Zak Belkhayat said. “Sometimes, teachers don’t tell you until that week. And other times, I have more than one a day.”
Extra curricular activities such as sports, clubs, and jobs only add to increasing stress levels.
Add these two to pressure to please parents and outdo peers, and you can see why students are so stressed.
“I feel like parents unknowingly make the pressure that comes with school worse,” sophomore Nia Lewis said.
According to a report published in Frontiers in Psychology, 49% of high school students report that they have a great deal of stress daily because of school. 31% percent said that they felt somewhat stressed.
A study at NYU found that students deal with chronic stress at higher rates than adults.
When people deal with too much stress as teenagers, it can have lasting effects.
In terms of mental health, it can lead to anxiety disorders and depression.
High levels of stress can also lead to a teenager developing eating disorders.
Stress can also effect physical health. Stress hormones wreak havoc on the immune system and can cause heart disorders.
Many people try to reduce stress levels with unfavorable methods.
“I’ve seen a lot of people who try to get answers from other people so that they can limit the amount of time that they have to spend doing work,” junior Arafat Aliya said.
Considering this, it’s easy to conclude that the harmful amounts of stress that school causes has made school about passing, not learning.
It would be much healthier for students if teachers were to give out less homework.
An alternate solution could be placing less of an emphasis on assessments. Either way, there needs to be a change, and fast.