Many students participate in after school activities such as sports, theater and robotics. Some students also have jobs outside of school, whether it be for savings or to support their families at home. These activities can take up incredible amounts of time for students, and on top of that, it can interfere with the completion of schoolwork. 

Many students express their struggles with getting work done, some talk about losing sleep, lack of free time and just general mental drain. Students need time to get school work done and with constant activities happening in their life, it makes it harder and harder to finish homework in a timely manner. The incompletion of work then evolves into more missing assignments that continue to pile up over time, thus stressing out students even more than they already are. On the other hand, students spend so much time completing work that they go to bed at unhealthy hours, making them sluggish and unprepared for the next day. Changes must be made to assist students in these types of situations.

Doctors say that high school students should be getting an average of 8 to 10 hours of sleep per night, but a study done by CDC reported that 7 out of 10 high school students do not meet this goal. A big reason for this is the fact that students feel too pressured by their workload to go to bed at a normal time, for fear of late work and falling behind. In addition,The Washington Post found that on average, high school students spend 2.7 hours a weekday doing homework. That adds up to 13.5 hours a week not including weekends.

As a final note, a study by the Better Sleep Council says that “homework is the most significant effect on teens’ stress levels and sleep.” Going off this information, it becomes clear how much students need time to do school work, and with after school activities taking up so much of their time, we begin to see the true difficulties of completing work in a timely manner.

When talking to CHS students about their experiences with completing homework with a busy schedule, Makena Coate, one of the leaders of the cross country team, states that track practice is “very draining” and as soon as she gets home she wants to sleep. Makena’s practice takes place every day after school for around 3 hours, and when races are taking place, they are full 8 hour events. By the time she gets home it is already really late, and yet she still makes an effort to get work done. She can be seen talking about the amount of homework she has been doing on her private Instagram story, often not getting to bed until  around 12:00am to 2:30am. Makena has a job outside of school as well, this job takes up most of her time on Sundays. With this schedule, she is often exhausted and mentally drained and has to spend more time than usual to complete work. She wishes teachers would “be more understanding” when it comes to late work, as well as have more “forgiving deadlines.”

“It gets in the way of my work a lot.” says Veda Svs, CHS student and member of the robotics team. She has participated in robotics at Capital for 4 years and she often struggles with work due to robotics taking up about 15 hours of time each week. The main cause of her struggle is having “a lot of deadlines all at once” that pile up and result in a great amount of work to be done in a short window of time. As a possible solution, Veda suggested “more in class work time” so students could spend time in class to deal with the workload they have been given.

Now the real question is, How do we go about solving this issue? There are actions that can be taken to assist students in these situations. One suggestion would be providing more in-class work time for students. Rather than expecting them to complete all the work at home, having time to do schoolwork IN school could prove to be beneficial to students with busy schedules. Another option would be less harsh due dates, to refrain from pressuring students to complete work within a short time frame. Finally, we could space out the amount of work given across more days, to prevent buildup of work and missing assignments. Let’s make a change.