End-of-year cramming adds to stress

Stressed out. The phrase describes the feelings most all high-school students experience during some point.  As students near the end of the year, the homework load might appear to become lighter but, in fact, the opposite is true.  Teachers are assigning extra credit, handing out projects and cramming in last-minute chapter homework problems. After juggling all of this schoolwork along with soccer practice and going to instrument lessons, the six-letter word ‘stress’ hangs over your head.

Students anticipate going home with the simple task of completing a study guide or two, but due to the procrastinating on other homework assignments, the history project due Monday you have been putting off until Sunday night looks like it is nowhere near completion.

 

Opening up your binder to the never-ending math problems and the endless science definitions tends to discourage students and gives the impression that teachers need to cram in leftover chapters that will be on their final exams the following week.  On top of the seven study guides that additionally need to be completed, your heart rate seems to beat faster and faster as the clock ticks from midnight to 1 in the morning.

While you take some “me-time” in the process by consulting your sock monkey on geometry problems, and convincing your mother to help add some glitter to your history project, your pulse rate goes down a bit, and the evil word “stress” lifts off your shoulders.

Taken as a whole, the last-minute cramming of assignments, projects and extra credit, packs on stress and does not do a student good.  Though teachers have no intention of bringing on the constant worrying, tapering off on the homework load would be a good idea.

By Erika Dietl, freshman