Dear Mr or Mrs President,

Congratulations and thank you for taking the time to read this paper. I’m writing today to talk about the stress that the students in our education system feel day to day.

Stress can affect thoughts, feelings and behavior. It can lead to heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes. Fifty percent of students admitted to being stressed during high school classes according to a study done at New York University.  The problem of stress during school has been large across America for a great deal of time. It needs to be addressed to help the young society who will grow into our workers, voters, moms, dads and teachers. I feel that the problem with stress could be helped by activities that have found to help relieve stress, things like yoga, music classes, and discussions. I also think we should start serving more tea at schools, it helps with stress. 

Another thing that causes stress is testing. There are a few reasons why testing is awful stressful to students. One, we know that the test scores that we have will greatly affect our future. Some students will go to such lengths to pass these tests that sometimes they go as far as cheating. Should our students really feel so much stress that we should have to cheat on our tests? Statics show that 75% of students between 8th-12th grade find themselves feeling physically sick before taking standardized tests. Rigidly timed, complicated and inflexible rules are the norm for our students. 

Also, the pressure we feel from our teachers is very great, which stresses students out immensely. Being asked a question by a teacher, I have found myself, along with many others, is scary. We feel that if we get the answer wrong, that we will get yelled at. This sometimes does happen, and having to guess if it will or not leaves us with that ‘I just rode a roller coaster and eat 2 hot dogs before I got on’ feeling. Teacher have a range of authority and they have their personal beliefs regarding what is wrong and what is right. Some teachers won’t even allow us to go to the bathroom without giving us a sigh or an eye roll. This causes stress to be able to say anything out loud because you fear that you will be in trouble. And who wants to deal with that?

Next, GPA/grades. A lot of kids like myself work overtime to have the best possible grades that we can. If I don’t, we might find ourselves in the office for a D+ because we got some questions wrong on an 100 point test and our teacher doesn’t allow retakes because “we should have been paying attention”. I have been lucky enough to have a teacher who allows retakes so that I can have the best grade that I can in his class; however, some kids don’t have the same luxury. Staying up until 11:30 every night to finish homework that consists of 30 questions to try and keep my grades in the “smart kid” zone is a struggle we all know too well. Cheating on a test or exam to keep my grade from falling through the floor is something I’ve had to do more than once. Why should our students be focused so much on keep grades up instead of learning how to do?

With all of this put together, and the small things that might stress us out, the 7 hours we sit in those chairs has become a nightmare none of us have been able to wake up from. We’re all zombies, trying to forget that we’re stressed in the first place. That’s why I think that relieving the stress our students feel is so important. We could learn so much easier. Yoga classes or music class. Adding small things into our day that could help us get through high school would be greatly appreciated by so many people. Being stressed out is incredibly unhealthy and should definitely be fixed.

Thank you again for reading, hopefully you will consider a few things to help the students in our generation.

Sincerely,

Jordin Gellis