It’s a phenomenon that has been overtaking the nation, and one that has certainly resonated within our very own halls. The “race-to-nowhere” phenomenon is wearing students thin, and it seems that schools have turned into homework factories rather than a place to build a foundation for our futures.
Nights spent cramming in work and studying until the early hours of the morning has been directly linked to short-term depression and exhaustion in students. It may not directly apply to high school students, but studies have shown homework has virtually no effect on success. According to Dr. Guy Winch from a piece in Psychology Today, “by the fourth and fifth grade and certainly in middle school, many of our children have hours of homework… all in addition to the eight hours or more they have to spend in school. Yet study after study has shown that homework has little to do with achievement in elementary school and is only marginally related to achievement in middle school.”
Teachers stress the importance of a healthy lifestyle, which includes a full eight hours of sleep every night and balanced meals. But numerous students exchange their lunch period for a time to study for upcoming tests and simply don’t see more than six hours of sleep as an option when they come home.
Teachers may believe that they aren’t assigning a lot of homework in their classes, but it seems that they seldom take into account that their class isn’t their student’s only class. More often than not, this is one of the main reasons students are overloaded with homework.
Personally, I have always found that being street smart and happy is a million times more important than being academically smart and successful. Time and time again, especially in our generation of innovators and “out of the box” thinkers, success stories often stem from those who weren’t necessarily top-ranked students, such as Brad Pitt who dropped out of Mizzou to act.
If there’s any group of kids who understand this “race” best, it’s the students in our school. The buzz of who is attending what college, whether or not they got into an Ivy League school, what their ACT score is, and how many AP classes are on their schedules seems to be the height of importance.
But honestly, that’s just bogus. Your education isn’t based on where you got it and who taught it to you. It’s based on what you make from what you’re taught, and how you apply it later in life. I don’t know how teachers expect us to be able to apply information we crammed into our heads in any real life situation; I for one can’t remember what I power-studied last week, let alone last year.
Thankfully, colleges in America look at your achievements as whole, not just on a score-based scale. But this doesn’t fix the fact that students are pushing themselves beyond their limits.
This brings up my next point: as much work as school may blanket us with, why do students seem to lose perspective that our futures really aren’t determined by that C- on our economics quiz?
It seems that as our backpacks get heavier with work, we trade in the importance of our well-being with the not so significant “importance” of our performance. It took me years to realize that the only opinion that matters in my life is my own, and that’s something I learned from my freshmen year study-hall supervisor, not any of the teachers who taught my majors. I feel like if students were to keep this in mind, they just might get that extra hour of sleep every night, which in the long run is worth more than that test in the morning.
The teacher-student relationship is supposed to be one that entails guidance and new perspective, and not one that evokes feelings of stress and even depression. It’s truly a shame that our generation is willing to sacrifice our health for an A that will never truly make a difference in our lives.