As May comes around I can't help but feel the end of the school year approaching. Only one more month of waking up at 6am and working from 8:40am-3:25pm, plus homework. Thats 6 hours 45 minutes of schoolwork, plus about 2 hours of homework everyday. So 8 hours and 45 minutes of every school day is spent working. Add that to 8 hours of sleep and 1 hour of preparing for school, we students only end up with 6 hours and 15 minutes to spend on our own (give or take). I may be alone on this, but I feel like school is taking up to much of our time, and I realize this during the summer when I have all the time in the world to explore my actual interests.
So I raise the question, are we being schooled too much? In my opinion, I think so. My life literally revolves around school as it takes up the most time in my day for 9 months of the year, and I have been in classes for the past 11 years. Because of this ridiculous amount of schooling, I am heavily leaning toward taking a gap year, but thats a different subject (see: To Consider a Gap Year by myself). After reading what I have written so far, you may completely disagree, but bear with me. I have a couple ideas of how to reduce the schooling and stress that comes with it, allowing students to truly explore their interests, not what the school wants them to be interested in.
Two day weekends feel short to me, so whenever we get a Monday or Friday off any reason at all, I become ecstatic. The weekend feels so much longer, and I am actually able to catch up sleep that I may have lost during the week I spent doing schoolwork. What if we extend the weekend to include Friday? Having 3 days to spend as we wish would be a considerable change, and I feel that schoolwork would improve because students wouldn't be as stressed or overworked as they are now.
The other solution (which I feel would be a much better idea), would be to completely eliminate homework. Students (especially at New Trier), end up with 3-4 hours of homework every once in a while, and that astounds me. That is basically as if we extended the end of school from 3:25pm to 7:25pm. Are you kidding me? That leaves nearly 3 hours of free time per night, and then you have to wake up early to do it all again. Eliminating homework would solve this problem. Once school ends for the day, the student would be able to relax and spend time doing things that they enjoy. In a book by Nancy Kalish and Sara Bennet, they write " [Homework] robs children of the sleep, play, and exercise time they need for proper physical, emotional, and neurological development. And it is a hidden cause of the childhood obesity epidemic, creating a nation of 'homework potatoes'." I couldn't agree more.
Now, in respect to length of the this post I will conclude it by saying this. I haven't done much research about what I have said above, but as a student at a very competitive school like New Trier, I feel my opinion is as valid as anyone else, and I hope that some change occurs by the time my children go through the school system to make them enjoy it more and develop their interests naturally.
Nate, I couldn't agree with you more. In fact, one of my favorite quotes goes as follows:
ReplyDelete"I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free."
- John Taylor Gatto
New Trier students are forced to go through some of the most rigorous and excruciating high school work in the entire country. For the past few months, I"ve been getting approximately six hours of sleep a night, and with the tennis season in full swing, my life has become nothing more than fulfilling one obligation before getting started on another. In my opinion, there's something wrong with the picture if students are required to devote the vast majority of their time to school. This is especially true when so many of our classes/work has to do with things we will never actually need in our profession. It really is a tragedy what has become of our education system, and I would argue that the stress some students are put under is simply inhumane.