An anatomy test took a toll on Addison Ranabargar.
“I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t study because I knew it wasn’t going to help, and I was just freaking out,” Ranabargar, a junior, said. “I wasn’t able to focus because I was so stressed.”
She isn’t the only one who feels this way.
The responsibilities for students and teachers have affected their mental health from the workload and time consumption.
“It’s just the workload that’s so stressful,” junior Alani Hernandez said. “I work on homework everyday.”
Along with school, there’s also their personal lives and other extracurricular activities that take up time.
Junior athlete Yaddimar Ramirez said the hours added up during tennis season.
“I (would) stay until 6 everyday,” she said. “I start doing my homework around 8:30, and don’t finish until 11.”
Hernandez said she’s observed her teachers experiencing the same things with their own workloads as well.
“Sometimes they’ll say, ‘I’m stuck on grading something,’” she said.
Precalculus teacher Robin Burk said she struggles to keep up with all her tasks.
“I always start every year gung ho, you know? Every year is like, ‘This is great, let’s go,’ but then we get an added workload,” Burk said. “It’s kind of rough because now I get here at 7:30 a.m., and yesterday, I didn’t leave until 5:45. And then I went home and spent about an hour still working.”
Burk said the stress makes her feel like “a completely different person” to her family.
“My husband says I’m two different people. He’s like, ‘You’re super intense,’” she said. “I’m Robin in the summer, happy, everything’s great–a completely different person compared to the school year.”
English teacher Shannon Conners-Casillo said that in her early years of teaching it was very stressful balancing her work life and personal life. However, she changed her daily routine to accommodate to teaching and her family.
“I would say that it affected me more in the past because I used to take a lot of work home, but I kind of refuse to do that now.”
Connors-Casillo said her family can also see the differences in her attitude during the school year.
“Sometimes I joke with my students and say they get the best version of me, and when I get home my kids get the subpar version of me,” Conners-Casillo said. “It affects my family when I have days where I’m really tired and I’ve just had a really busy day with my students because then I have to go home and use that same part of my brain with my family.”
Just like students can see how teachers are stressed, teachers can see students are stressed as well.
“You can see it in their faces,” Burk said. “They walk in and they’re tired or overwhelmed.”
Both teachers said the test-focused education system gives students the misconception of what learning is.
“I don’t think that you guys are learning at the depths of how you should be learning. Part of that is because we have such a testing culture,” Conners-Casillo said. “You need to know the fact and then you can forget it, and I don’t remember that being a part of my high school career.”
Burk agreed.
“It just sucks all the joy out of learning,” she said. “They’re so afraid of being wrong, and I think that because of these standardized tests, we put so much pressure pressure on the learning and it makes kids kind of shut down and say, ‘Well, if I don’t get it the first time then I’m stupid and I can’t get it.’”
This feeling of stupidity affects students in which they feel too scared to ask questions to understand the concept, so when they don’t understand it affects their grade, which further affects their mental health on preparing for the future and feeling that they’re not smart enough.
“My favorite time is when people ask questions,” Burk said. “When I get to be out in the classroom working with kids, but so little of my day is actually spent doing that.”
“If I could make the testing not so important… I would do that,” Conners-Casillo said.
“For the most part, you just try to memorize stuff and you forget about it, I think it’s useless,” Ramirez said. “The schools make it seem like if you can’t memorize it, then you’re dumb.”
Hernandez said she didn’t sign up for the PSAT this year since it wasn’t required.
“[The tests are] just so draining,” she said. “I feel like it’s an expectation to do it and I just didn’t do it.
“I feel stupid for not doing it,” she said.