I wake up, get ready, go to school, go to practice, go home, and do homework. That is what my schedule consists of every single day. At school, I take tests and quizzes, and do assignments or presentations in class. Then I go to practice, go home, and continue my school work. It is an exhausting, repeating cycle of school, school, and school.
I am sure a lot of students feel this way, I just want to put it into words by how frustrating it is. I feel pressured to take three AP classes because that is shown to me as the norm, or even the minimum. Any letter grade that is a B or lower is considered a bad grade for a lot of students, so anything less than an A has a huge impact on me. Especially as a person who seeks academic validation, when I feel like I can not keep up, I feel worthless. Then, those grades affect my mental health, and my mental health affects my grades. It is a cycle I have not been able to get out of since freshman year, and junior year especially has taken a huge toll on me.
I get home from practice around 6:00 pm every day, after an eight-hour school day. I go home, and I have time for nothing but homework. I’m either up doing assignments all night or studying for my classes. For example, last night I was up until 12:30 am doing homework, with no breaks since I got home that night. I woke up in the morning and finished my homework because I did not have the time the previous night. Students should not be staying up until the early hours of the morning to complete homework; it has little to no benefits. I get on average five or six hours of sleep every night, because I’m up early doing homework and stay up late the night before doing homework.
This is not a healthy thing for any kid. The amount of schoolwork and studying I do just for it to not pay off a lot of the time is super un-motivating. People say that the amount of work or effort you put in will reflect in your grades, but that is just not true. I am such a hard-working person, yet my grades never seem to be good enough. Another factor that affects my motivation is the extremely unrealistic expectation of grades. At school, taking three APs in junior year is strongly encouraged, and it feels like a constant battle of who can take the most APs in high school. Getting A’s in every class is expected, when really that is such a difficult thing to do. Prioritizing and finishing school work is required, but it feels like teachers don’t realize that people actually have lives outside of school. It is hard to have the energy every day to go and do school and take tests for eight hours, and then go home and do more school for hours on end.
These cycles make it scarily easy to fall into a depression during the school year. If you are anything like me and you seek academic validation, then you know seeing bad grades in PowerSchool just takes a ginormous toll on mental health. And having an unhealthy mentality reflects in school, because it becomes impossible to find the motivation once you fall into that deep hole.
School has become too much. Everyone is working towards the goal of having a future, and we center our lives around education until we are in our twenties, depending on how far someone goes with college. Six different classes, with teachers assigning things relentlessly, and tests, quizzes, or presentations every week, become mentally and physically exhausting. School no longer feels like a privilege, but only something that drains me every day.
