Students are vexed with more and more homework and higher and
higher expectations
Sixteen-year-old
”
Amy
”
is a junior at San Benito High School. She is involved with
after-school activities, athletics, and like most of her peers has
an average of 12 hours of homework per week.
Students are vexed with more and more homework and higher and higher expectations
Sixteen-year-old “Amy” is a junior at San Benito High School. She is involved with after-school activities, athletics, and like most of her peers has an average of 12 hours of homework per week.
The Pinnacle isn’t using Amy’s real name in order to allow her to candidly describe what a typical student faces in today’s academic environment – often a time bomb of anxiety and pressure to get good grades to attend a good school to obtain a good job.
“My head is in a vice,” Amy said. “So much of the time I’d rather be hanging out with my friends and not worrying about what I’ll likely be doing in two years, but my parents are pushing. I need to think about college today, tomorrow I can relax.”
But at what point does Amy have time to simply be Amy?
Hollister students like Amy join millions of students across the United States in fighting an often-overwhelming battle with increasing amounts of homework and the expectations of standardized testing. These kids are pressured to succeed. But it doesn’t just start in high school. Kids as young as three or four are assuming greater pressure to achieve more and more at a younger age.
With schools pushing standardized tests and businesses pushing for better-trained students to help compete in the global workforce, there are definite downsides to these accelerated academic demands.
Some of the pressure comes from parental expectations. Some of the students have parents that never graduated from high school or went to a four-year college and they want these benefits for their children, so they push harder, said SBHS counselor Jim Caffiero.
“It’s become more prevalent over the last five years,” Caffiero said. “Kids feel more pressured to get into the advanced and Advanced Placement classes. I have kids in my office all the time because they feel pressured.”
The SBHS Board of Trustees recently reduced the number of units required for graduation from 235 to 220, Caffiero said.
Younger children don’t know how to express the emotions they’re feeling so while they may feel the same pressures with homework requirements and added criteria as older students, they don’t know how to communicate how overwhelmed they are, said child psychologist Nickie Sargeant.
“Everyone wants measurable goals – how many words can a kid recognize, how many math problems can they do? Nobody is asking what this does to the kids,” Sargeant said. “I saw an article recently on bullies. We have standards that are ‘bullies’ and they stand up there and say teach this or else the state will come in and take over your school.”
Sargeant knows teachers that have had to eliminate things like music and physical education so that they can teach to the standards, but without those courses children cannot function well emotionally.
“The kids don’t know how to deal with subjective states and there is no time for the feelings. When they have P.E. they get to vent, or they’re in the school play and they get to act out. If you kill the joy of learning how do you get kids excited?” Sargeant said.
Many of the students she deals with now are teenagers who have more negative attitudes toward school; they don’t see the relevance of classes in their lives. Consequently, she more students peeling away and pursuing independent study.
“I see it coming from parental expectations,” said Susan Alonzo, Director of the Child Development Center at Gavilan College. “Parents bring their children in at 2 years old and want them to learn the ABCs, but we don’t do that. We try to combine academics with play. We study all aspects of the kids. Our focus is on play, but parents do pressure us to have their children learn sooner, because those parents have older children and know what to expect.”
She said that type of behavior definitely affects young minds, which is why Gavilan does their child development through play.
Many of the kids who attend Sandra Terry’s Select Learning Techniques Tutorial Studio, in Hollister, are there to get ahead of the curve.
“I’ve got 35 kids currently that are spread out pretty evenly between pre-kindergarten through the 12th grade. A lot of the younger ones’ parents want to get a jumpstart on their education,” Terry said.
But the standards have changed. Terry has been an educator for 37 years and she said that these days the children definitely seem to be going much deeper into the materials than they used to.
“I get a lot of students and parents who feel like the homework load is becoming overwhelming. They have to work three or more hours per night in order to finish it all. While the kids are here we have to spend half of their time working on homework before we get into some of the self-esteem building exercises,” Terry said. “Over the summer I had the most students I’ve ever had consistently. I had 45 students all summer long.”
Amy said that just staying caught up with all the reading for all of her classes is an exhausting exercise that requires a lot of patience. There is a new advisory period for students to get help with homework and tutoring. The tutoring helps she said, but outside of the classroom Amy also has to focus on studying for the SAT tests she’ll take again in the spring, as well as college applications and biographical essays that many schools require.
“Sometimes it feels like it will never end,” Amy said.
Teachers can’t really be blamed for assigning more homework than they used to, Caffiero said. Teachers at the high school all use the same red book, which determines how much homework teachers give, so no teacher should be giving any more homework than any other.
Angela Scarcella is the Parent Teacher Association president at Gabilan Hills elementary school in Hollister. She has two daughters, one in the fifth grade and one in first. Scarcella’s youngest daughter has no problems with schoolwork, but her oldest needs more time, time that is not available under the often rapid-fire pace that has students flying through materials in order to cover all the required standards.
“Consequently she freezes when it comes time to take the tests and her scores show improvement needed,” Scarcella said. But both of her daughters enjoy school, at least for now.
Amy doesn’t enjoy school. She doesn’t have time to enjoy school or any of the things she’d like to because her schedule is full. The rest of her high school experience will be a race; college will be a race and when she eventually gets to her chosen profession she may be left wondering what happened?
