Teens Overwhelmed

Teens don’t fail because we’re lazy. We are just overwhelmed

By: Kamry Scanna | 4/8/22

Teens don’t fail because we’re lazy. We are just overwhelmed. Our daily lives have so much going on and school is another added part to it. We get work that needs to be completed by a specific time and that adds an abundant amount of stress. We want to succeed in life and do well, but we also are trying not to crack under all the stress and pressure.

Most teens have very busy schedules. We balance sports and keeping in touch with friends and family, especially those that we don’t see everyday. We also have to focus on our home lives and relationships, with not just our friends but our family too. Some students even have jobs after school and on the weekends. Along with all that, we know we have to fit in school work because it is important for our understanding and future. Fitting in the amount of schoolwork we get on average to do at home can be very difficult, causing many of us who care to experience a lot of anxiety and failure.

All of this adds up and causes a lot of stress. We go to school for almost 7 hours, 5 days a week and then are expected to go home and do more work. If you think about it, most students have 7 or 8 classes that would give out homework. Not every teacher gives homework every night, but even if half of our teachers give out homework every night, that adds up. So if you have 4 classes to do homework for, and around 30 minutes each class, that is 2 hours each night doing homework if we work efficiently (which let’s face it, who here actually works free from distraction, even on a good day?) That is a lot to do when sports or work start right after school and can run until 9 at night or later. Once we get home from these activities, we do our homework but that just means that we are staying up later, which causes us to be more tired during the day.

Many teachers have very strict deadlines for when homework is due. If we don’t get work completed and turned in on time, we automatically get a zero for that assignment, causing so much more stress and anxiety on top of what we already felt trying to complete the work or knowing we missed our chance to do it.

Teachers often don’t know why an assignment is not completed and we wish they would ask us why instead of assuming we didn’t care.

But we do care, we’re just overwhelmed.

What if we had a rough night? What if we had a family situation going on that night? What if our mental health isn’t in the best place? According to Stat News, anxiety and depression rates have increased almost 30% in the past year, and the main reason for that is because of the pandemic.

Some teachers are very understanding and have late credit opportunities, but not all the teachers allow that. Some of my teachers have “one day late passes” which allow you to turn in an assignment one day late without getting points taken off, but you can only use a limited amount per marking period. This is super beneficial to us, especially if we had a rough night.

I’m not saying that teachers shouldn’t give us work to do, because their job is for us to learn, but many students would benefit if teachers would just be more understanding when it comes to homework. We get upset when teachers just say that it’s late and don’t even let us explain what was going on. Many students are scared to ask for help, because we’re scared of what the teacher will think about us, even though that is what they are there for.

Students really benefit when teachers utilize Google Classroom as much as they can. Personally, when teachers post things under categories, like for each unit, under the classwork tab it is a lot easier to find what work needs to be done. It also is very helpful when teachers put specific due dates on the assignments because if we have the Google Classroom app on our phone, we get a notification when an assignment is due.

Especially now, with the pandemic, many students are missing out on almost a week of school because they are getting quarantined. It would help us out a lot if we were able to check what work we missed before returning to school. Also, if it is important material that we missed, teachers who allow us to come in for AA or stay after school so we can learn it help make us feel at ease.

Sometimes it feels like teachers put a lot of the blame on us for our homework not being completed. Even though it is our responsibility to have it completed, it’s frustrating when teachers jump to conclusions about why it is not finished. We understand that we didn’t do it, we know we had to get it done, and we already feel bad enough without the blame coming from someone else.

High school is very difficult and stressful for most high school students, but the good part about our school is that we have many adults that you can meet and talk to. We care about our academics and are thankful for teachers who are understanding and helpful with stressful situations, including mental health, and other adults, like social workers and guidance counselors that might be able to help us out.