With almost all your tests, projects, and crucial homework assignments all due on one day, it’s almost impossible to keep up with all of your schoolwork. With documentaries like “Race to Nowhere” (shown last year at MVHS), it’s no secret that kids today are receiving even more pressure to work harder in schools. Since teachers may often be oblivious to what different departments are doing, it’s not uncommon for students to have a test, a project, and a speech all due on the same day.
To help fix this issue, teachers of different departments should communicate more during Wednesday morning staff meetings to help reduce the workload of students. If teachers could announce when their tests would be to teachers of different departments, other teachers could plan around these dates.
An example of how communication between teachers can help students is the senior finals system administered last year. The plan was to distribute all the heavier finals all on different days; for example, all of the English tests would be on Monday, the math tests on Tuesday, etc. This plan was beneficial to the seniors a lot because they were not overloaded with all of their hardest tests in one day. However, we can’t exactly implement a schedule like this to last the whole year because classes generally move at different paces.
Also, since the school is so big, the teachers could sometimes slip up once or twice and you could potentially have two tests or projects due on the same day. However, these occurrences would be less frequent, reducing the overall stress upon students.
Teachers may argue that teens are young adults, and that they should be trained to take on all this stress to prepare for college. In college, most teachers just assume that the only class you should be worrying about is their class. Teachers of the MVHS freshman class should collaborate even more often than those teaching other grade levels to make sure that freshmen don’t feel too overwhelmed with too much work on the same day. That way, the transition from middle school to high school can be a bit less bumpy. By the time students reach senior year, they’ve all been smoothly prepped to thrive in college.
And maybe, just maybe, students might even get the recommended eight hours of sleep instead of the six hours we average each night.
Instead of looking at their departments as islands, teachers should look at themselves as a part of a whole community. While this may seem like yet another task that teachers have to take on in their busy lives, these meetings would sincerely help the students throughout their high school years. It will allow for a much more focused, happy, and higher-performing group of students, as numerous methods, technological and otherwise, with lessening homework loads in other high schools, such as Palo Alto High have shown.
One such method was done by Sara Bennett, the author of The Case Against Homework: How Homework is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It, found out that students in Thailand and Greece recieved more homework than students in Denmark and Japan. However, students in Denmark and Japan did better on “achievement tests” than students from Thailand and Greece.
And teachers would hear less whiny complaints about too much work from students, right?
It’s the start of second period. Your teachers met up yesterday and your science teacher decided to move their test to the following day, because your history teacher had a test today. You’re glad that after the test in third period, you won’t have any more tests until tomorrow. You breathe a sigh of relief before the bell blares once more, signaling the start of a fresh, more relaxing day.
