As of recently, the work for this year as a junior has felt very overwhelming. There hasn’t been a week where I wasn’t worried or stressed about my schoolwork. I’ve heard from so many others as well that the work is starting to increase and pile on top of each other every day. Is all this work actually helping out with my learning?
I am a student who has a job outside of school and having to balance both this year gets very difficult. When I work, I won’t get done until seven, and that leaves very little time to get all the extra work done. Even when I don’t work, I get home from school and have to start working on homework right away. As a junior, the hardest classes I take are AP PreCalculus, APUSH (Advanced Placement United States History) and IB English. For a majority of my classes, I get homework outside of school. For some of the classes, I need extra time to focus on them, but the large workload makes it difficult to do so.
Most juniors I’ve spoken to or know, have a job or extracurriculars outside of school and even they don’t have as much time as they prefer to complete their assignments. No student wants to come home from working their job and have to do hours on end of homework until midnight. Another problem students have run into is choosing social life over school life. As a teenager, no one wants to have to decide this, especially when you love hanging out with your friends, and you have a load of school work to do over the weekend.
The stress of the work is also a big part of it. This year you start taking classes that could help you decide where you might want to attend college as well as what you might want to do in the future, and that’s a big thing to think about. The amount of assignments we get leads to stress for not just me, but I’m sure many others. Once you miss one thing, it sets you back another day, and then that turns into an ongoing pattern.
Junior year already gets very hectic with all the tests. For example, the ACT or SAT or other standardized tests, worrying about credits to graduate and the big one — thinking about where you’re gonna go to college. All of these add up on top of the work we get for school. It doesn’t matter if you’re taking normal classes or AP classes; there is still the same amount of work being given to you. Thinking about going to college in junior year is a big deal because not only do you think about it, but you have to visit some colleges, and it’s hard to do that with little time and little breaks across the year.
Overall, the workload of junior year is a very stressful situation for all students across Park. Students don’t have any more time to do the things they enjoy, like being with family or friends, or as simple as just relaxing without having to worry about the amount of school work they have that day or the tests and assignments they have coming up in the week. I have overheard too much stress about the assignments that are due or how much work they still have to complete in a certain amount of time and that it overwhelms them so much. As a junior, we don’t look forward to having to make the decisions of school and friends and it shouldn’t have to come down to that.
