In today’s society, students hold themselves to an unattainable standard to meet criteria for the college of their choice. Every day, we hear students complaining about how challenging it is to balance their school work and participate in extracurricular activities while also having free time for themselves. Students feel the need to do as much as possible to one up their peers, regarding them as competitors rather than friends. They do not realize that sometimes less is more. Doing ten meaningless extracurricular activities will not get you as far as students who do extracurriculars they are passionate about and have leadership roles in. We felt students’ voices were necessary for this issue, so we decided to listen to what our peers had to say.  

We asked each student the same questions so we could get an accurate account of how they felt. To obtain these responses we sent out an online survey to 6 students, which consisted of one multiple choice question and one free-response question. The multiple choice question was “On a scale of 1-5 how stressed have you been with juggling school, work, and outside activities?” With 1 indicating little to no stress and 5 indicating significant stress, it was not surprising to see that not a single student chose 1 on the stress level scale. The following image shows the results from the choices the students picked about their level of stress. 

The open-ended question we asked was, “Do you feel like teachers could plan out assignments or communicate with students better to make both their lives easier?” Each of the students gave a written response. Although each student had a different idea of what could be changed, all of the ideas we collected would help resolve some of the stress that students face. The responses we collected were as follows:

Anonymous: Yes. I enjoy it when teachers post weekly plans so I can plan ahead.

Anonymous: Yes, they could lessen the amount of tests/quizzes we have per week or every other week. Homework is fine though.

Jack Ufberg: My teachers do a good job giving a couple days heads up.

Anonymous: Yes, 100%. Teachers communicating more would benefit me and many students much more.

Holiday Fried: Yes, teachers could definitely communicate with students better by giving updates via email. 

Grace Gordon: If they seemed more open to communicate and student-teacher relationships rather than being on top of what is due.

After gathering feedback from numerous students, we were able to recognize students’ desire to progress away from a stress-filled education system. In the second part of this article, we will address our teachers’ perspective about the issue at hand.