Opinion Story

A lot of high school students stress themselves out about their grades, and stay up very late to get all of their work done.  According to the gatherings of people, this is for two reasons:  one, a lot of pressure is put on students in high school; two, high school students get a seriously heavy workload.  We students sacrifice our mental health in order to get work assigned to us done, and it is completely unfair.

Missing one assignment, especially as you get further into high school, is the kiss of death for most students, whether in the teacher's eyes or the student's own.

Teachers tend to get insulted if a student does not finish or turn in a paper on time, and they have no right to.  Sometimes, students have so much work that they - in a literal sense - cannot get all of their work done.

I can understand where teachers come from, giving us all this work.  They believe it helps us learn, and helps us receive a better understanding of the concepts we are learning in class.  But giving us so much work hurts our brains us much as it helps us - with more work, we get less sleep, leading to more headaches and a whacked sleep schedule.  It also makes us constantly worried about getting everything done on time.

We do not like to disappoint our teachers, but our teachers constantly disappoint us.  Their attitude toward our workload seems to send the message:  "School is more important than mental health."  According to some students, maybe it is.

The thing is, though, our teachers should not decide this for us.  We should have the right to decide our own ratio of mental health to schoolwork.

This needs to be fixed.  Students should be able to regulate the amount of work they get everyday.  We are not able to assert any sort of influence in our schools, and the workload is never considered among things we should get a say in.  Yes, some people would say that students would just vote for no work at all, but not all students are like this.  There is a breaking point somewhere in the amount of workload we get, and all we would have to do is find it.

A survey could be created in order to find the approximate amount of work a teenager can do before they simply can't do any more.

Overall, the lessening of the student workload could help improve both their grades and mental health, while simultaneously creating an even better reputation for Bowie High School.

People are always saying that students need to enjoy their "high school experience," but how can we when we're constantly sat down poring over our work?  If the amount of work we get changes, we would finally be able to gather some enjoyment from these four years of our lives.