Time, Pressures of Life Make School a Challenge

Apr 2, 2017

One thing that has never been hard for me was speaking my mind and asking as many questions as I needed to understand a subject, but that changed this year.

Since I've entered high school, I've found it harder to speak my mind and to ask questions about the material. This is most likely due to all of the new pressures I've not yet had to deal with in my life. The work is much harder than I've had before and I've found time management much more difficult, debating between allocating my time to sports, homework, friends, and personal time for myself.

Sports have never taken more than two to three hours of my day, but this year I've been out at football games until 1 a.m. This has been a radical change for me and it has been a struggle getting used to. School also has become more of a challenge to keep up with. When you're out until late and school starts at 7:30 a.m., it can be hard to stay on top of the homework assignments and remember all of the information presented in class. This leads into the controversial changing of school start time.

There's been talk of changing the start time of school from 7:30 to 8:30 a.m. I believe that this would be a mistake for a multitude of reasons. First, it would interfere with parents who drop their kids off at school and change their schedules.

Kids would most likely skip school more often because their parents wouldn't be there to ensure that they got on the bus at the correct time. This would lead to more students failing classes and dropping out of school. Because of this, there would be less intelligent millennials, and the future of the United States would lose its tight grip on the world’s economy. It would be a downward spiral: we would lose power, and our great nation could fall.

School can be a stressful environment for anybody. Whether it be homework, sports, social reputations, drama, or juggling work and school, we all have handicaps that make it hard for us.

Some people may struggle with substance abuse, and that's an even bigger handicap than most have. They might possibly use to take them out of this world and into a place where they feel loved, accepted, and cared about. However, they don't realize that in doing this, they're putting themselves at risk of being arrested or suspended. It also interferes with their ability to study and retain information. Some students have to deal with abuse or divorce which can also thrust them into drug abuse.

School is hard for almost all of us. We all have our problems, and it can be hard to juggle school and deal with those issues. There are never any easy solutions to these problems and it's important for students to be able to get the help that they need. Whether their problems stem from a lack of self confidence, parents’ divorce, or substance abuse, students need to be able to rely on their peers to help them through their problems and achieve greatness.

James Stevenson is a first-year student at Oceanside High School.