“Some of the teachers add a lot of work and then don’t give a lot of time and it makes school stressful,” says 10th grader Hannah Vig.

School can affect students’ mental health. A lot of the times teachers will pile up work that the students don’t understand.  Teachers don’t always explain things fully, which makes it hard for kids to learn and get a good understanding. 

Teachers can sometimes tell their students aren’t feeling good, but not always. Students aren’t always comfortable talking to teachers about their grades or how they’re overwhelmed with the class work.  Teachers should give check ups for their classes, to see how the class is doing. 

What are other ways teachers and schools can do better to help students? 

Many students have suggested that teachers should offer breaks during a class and offer more ways to help students like making study sessions and offering a little help to people who need it.           

“Ï think Wednesday’s should be a catch up day,” says Shayan, a 9th grader at Skyline.  Some staff have suggested Skyline make Wednesdays be more of a catch up/relaxing day for students, which is very helpful.   

 “Students have come up to me to say that their teachers have been allowing Wednesdays to be a free day to work on whatever they need and we really like that,” says counselor Ms.Bass.

Our school has been putting an effort into students’ mental health by making a quiet space for kids to go to when they need it.  They also offer peer-to-peer, a group for kids to go to when they need people to talk to.

Two years ago when Covid-19 first hit, we went on lockdown for a year and faced online schooling. During online schooling, people have had bad and good experiences. 

To start off with some good experiences: we all loved the fact that we could sleep in and of course do school in bed.  Plus, we didn’t have to interact with people when we didn’t want to.  At first online schooling seemed great and it started off good and fun

But… with virtual school you’re at home so there are a lot more distractions.  You could get sidetracked easily. A lot of kids had trouble getting off of their devices to focus on class.  Some slept through class or kept putting off assignments until there were too many. 

“A lot of times I had trouble getting off of my phone and didn’t pay attention to classes,” reports one anonymous Skyline student.

In person might seem like the worst thing ever to some, but it may be easier in some cases.  In person, we don’t really have a choice whether or not to do the work.  We don’t have the option of putting it off and saying “I’ll do it later.” 

But it wasn’t just hard for students.  According to teachers, it was hard getting a hold of students when they weren’t turning things in or showing up to class.  It’s also hard to tell how students are feeling behind screens unless they say something. It’s also a lot of work going in person then virtual because you have to make assignments for both in person and virtual.

Teachers usually have big classes.  The more students you have, the more assignments you have to grade. That can take hours. Plus teachers have lives outside of school, just like kids do: there is life stress like children and bills and whatnot. 

With that being said, school overall can be a stressful thing for not just students, but teachers as well. Sometimes school is not easy and it can be hard, but don’t stress yourself too much.