Imagine you are a high school student on the football team with seven classes and a job at Starbucks.
You’re probably exhausted. School, football and the constant demands of work hit you hard, especially around test days. Last minute studying and insufficient sleep are staples in your student life.
With so many hours of school-related activies to do, high schoolers can easily feel overwhelmed. With that menacing test or project around the corner, it might feel pointless and tedious to sit in front of your textbook for hours on end, on the brink of hysteria when all your tests gang up on you on the same day.
Though many teachers try to give minimal amounts of homework, bits and pieces from each class can quickly accumulate and take hours to finish. The National Education Association recommends no more than ten minutes of homework per grade level each night, yet many of my tenth grade friends who should receive no more than 100 minutes of homework daily stay up late finishing three hours of it.
After waking up at 6 a.m. unrested due to last night’s study session, our football player is expected to remain alert for the duration of the day. Even if he was not up finishing homework, he may still have been awake because melatonin, the body’s sleep hormone, is released later in teenagers, which makes it harder for us to fall asleep earlier than 11 p.m.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, teenagers require at least 9.5 hours of sleep a day, since our brains are still developing. However, most teenagers in the United States get seven hours of sleep or less with 60% reporting feeling tired throughout the day. I find it funny how school is supposed to help develop our brains, but gets in the way of sleep, which actually does develop our brains.
Teachers can help prevent student fatigue by allowing more time to work on projects or assigning less homework problems. Even starting school a bit later would help. A report by CBS News found that schools starting at 8:30 a.m. or later have better grades and attendance, less car accidents and less cases of obesity and depression in students.
Despite the hard day at school, football practice ended late, at 7 p.m. Students with extracurricular activities such as a sport or band stay at school even after seventh period, while others with community service and jobs are overworked when off-campus. Students spend eight to twelve hours a day at school, resulting in 40 to 60 hours a week. In contrast, the average adult work week is around 45 hours, and they get paid to go to work.
Students are working just as hard, if not harder, than many adults. We sit through boring lectures and suck up to superiors just like them, so where are the unions lobbying for our humane working hours?