Dear Future President,

Everyday, I wake up at 5 in the morning and get ready for my day. I attend seminary from 6:30-7:15 and then I am at school before 8. My school day goes from 8:00 am - 3:00 pm. At school, I have 6 periods, an hour each, with a 30 minute lunch in between 3rd and 4th. Immediately after the bell rings, I head to the locker room to get ready for volleyball or track depending on the sports season. These sport’s practices roughly go from 3:30-5:30 Monday thru Friday with games/meets on any day of the week with the exception of Sunday’s. Then I go home and I’m exhausted, but I still have homework to do because it is due the next day. Those homework assignments from 6 different classes can take up to 3 or 4 hours every night. By the time I am done with it all, it’s typically around 9 or 10. Then I have to shower and get ready for bed. Most nights, it’s not until 11 that I get to actually fall asleep. Then I’m up at 5 the next morning doing it all over again. I don’t know about you, but to me, that sounds like an overload for a teenager. There needs to be more time in a day, which we know can’t happen, or less classes per day.

When sitting in a class for an hour, my teachers seem to be rushing through the lesson and my classmates are hurrying to get their work done so they won’t have homework. Kids have extracurricular activities such as sports, speech and debate, work, etc., that they don’t have time to do 3 hours of homework every night. There isn’t enough time in our day to get what we need to get done, therefore we get stressed out. Personally when I get stressed out, I get migraines, I don’t sleep well and I don’t eat well. It’s miserable trying to keep up with all my school work, sports, babysitting and finding time to hang out with my friends and it gets worse throughout the school year.

The way our school day is set up doesn’t allow students to get the one on one time with teachers that we might need. My typical class period has my teacher’s teaching us for approximately 45-55 minutes within the hour block. This doesn’t leave much time for questions I, as one person, may have, let alone the 25 or so other students may have. That leaves us with unanswered questions and clueless about some of the work we are doing. This can cause us to fall behind and be even more stressed than we already are.

There is a solution to help with the stress levels of the students. Our education system should adapt block scheduling. An example of block scheduling would be that students would have 4 classes on Monday and the other 4 classes on Tuesday and continuing to alternate throughout the week. If we had 90 minutes classes with an hour of that being instructional time, it would allow teachers to get through the curriculum more in depth. It would also let the kids ask questions and get their homework/classwork done. The 4x4 schedule gives the kids an extra night to get their homework done if they hadn’t finished it in class. This extra time would make the stress on the kids significantly less. It would also make the amount we learn in our classes significantly more.

Sincerely,

Jedera

12th grade

Billings, MT