December 2024
By Jacqueline Cruz and Kayla Randel, Assistant Editors
As the school year progresses, many students at Kipp Austin College are beginning to feel the weight of increasingly demanding school schedules. Between homework, extracurricular activities, and part-time jobs, many students are struggling to balance it all, many questioning whether current workloads are sustainable or healthy. Can it be possible for students to excel without a feeling of constant overwhelm?
Student workloads have become a significant concern, with students often balancing academic demands with extracurricular activities and personal responsibilities. Excessive workloads can lead to increased stress and decreased productivity, raising many questions about the sustainability of the current demands. As schools are preparing students for future success, the debate over the appropriate amount of work has become more relevant, as students struggle to meet school expectations while sacrificing their youth and time of being a kid.
There are many contributing factors of academic overload, and some of those factors can go ignored or unnoticed. The education system is based on giving students a short time limit to complete a year’s worth of work plus incorporating standardized tests that test how quickly you can answer the question rather than what you have learned from the course. For students, school can sometimes feel like a scam due to academic systems that cause students to feel like they’re not measured as a human being but instead as some sort of lab experiment.
Grades, GPA, and test scores are all major contributors to how you are viewed as a student and overall person, but for a lot of students their low grades reflect an imbalance in schedule or workload. Many students’ schedules are packed with extracurricular activities, work, school, and family responsibilities and all of these things at once can be a lot to manage for one single student. Unfortunately, many teachers don’t consider these facts–and even when they do, they aren’t incorporating this into their lesson planning.
Teachers aren’t purposefully trying to stress students out. Amber Corral, a teacher at KIPP Austin Collegiate who instructs AP U.S. History and Psychology, is a great example of someone who is dedicated to helping her students succeed and deeply understand the material.
Corral pointed out, “It’s so absolutely necessary to learn the discipline of one doing homework. Not just my homework, but the discipline of actually sitting down and focusing for however long to do the homework.” And homework can be beneficial to students, especially for learning time management, perseverance, and problem solving. But this this is only true to an extent. The amount of homework and classwork is not fitting to the time given for the assignments to be completed. Many students do not have the time outside of school or even the environment for them to focus and this plays a major role whether they are academically successful or not. Too often, teachers aren’t considering these obstacles.
And teachers sometimes overlook the fact that the amount of time and effort required to complete assignments can vary significantly for each student.
AP Biology teacher Wesley Nakamura explained that he tries to take these differences into account. “I go based on experience. It’s not always accurate. If an activity takes longer than I originally thought, I try to allow more time for students to complete it,” Nakamura said.
However, while some teachers try to feel what their students are feeling by testing out the work that they assign students from themselves, that alone does not guarantee an understanding of what life is like for students in 2024. KAC students say that the academic overload has forced them to be multiple people at once and stress themselves until they can no longer handle it. Angel Flores, an 11th grader, said, “Junior year’s more emotionally and then mentally harder.” Angel explained that his workload has caused him to be physically exhausted. In addition, he said, most of the time school is mentally exhausting because he’s constantly stressing himself out trying to get all the work done and please all his teachers yet still continue having a life outside of his academics.
Other students have also expressed the drastic toll being taken on them with trying to keep up in all their classes. 11th-grader Janet Ortuno also expressed, “I can’t really go out much because I’m focused on finishing my studies and everything I put into my mental life. I feel like I’m just over-stressing myself and like putting pressure on myself to always finish my work on time.” She emphasized her craving for a life outside of being a student but said she doesn’t get the chance to because of how much work she’s getting constantly. Ortuno shared that she feels like she is constantly feeling overwhelmed by the pile of work she gets on a daily and weekly basis.
Imagine a future in which the workload of students is better controlled. Imagine attending a school where we are motivated and not overburdened with an excessive amount of schoolwork but instead assignments motivate us rather than drain us from our teenage years. That is something worthwhile to pursue.
The Cardinal Post 