In life, people face a lot of conflicting expectations and situations. This is especially true for high school students. Now, this opinion piece is not meant to call out and criticize anyone. It is based off of common trends I have noticed during my high school experience, discussions with friends who attend other schools, and articles I have read about similar material. I do not intend to offend anyone with this article, and I sincerely apologize if any part of this seems to be directed towards someone. I assure you, it is not intended that way.
The first area I’ve always seen conflict in is extracurriculars. When we’re freshmen, we’re told to join a sport, theatre, or club of some type to make ourselves more well rounded people. We’re also told that the more extracurriculars we’re involved in, the better our college applications will look, which may mean better scholarships. But we quickly encounter the first conflict of interest: Which comes first, your team or your grades? At the start of every season, coaches and directors always tell you that school comes first. That never really seems to carry through, though. You’re not allowed to miss practice to study for the three tests you have the next day, because your contribution to the team or production suddenly seems more important than you passing a test. There are, of course, times when exceptions are given, but they are often few and far between.
Similarly, students who are involved with sports and theater productions are always expected to have their work in the next day, even if they were busy with their extracurriculars until 10 in the evening. There is nothing wrong with expecting students to have their work done on time, but sometimes it isn’t possible to finish everything, especially during one’s junior year when students receive their heaviest work load. Even if a particularly busy student uses every single study hall to its full potential, they sometimes still run out of time to finish everything. Teachers don’t always seem to recognize this struggle that students face, frequently telling them that they should have worked harder in their study halls and that it was their choice to join the sport so they should manage their time better. There are students who don’t put in the time, but when a student is working as hard as they possibly can but still not accomplishing everything that is required, it can cause stress and depression when teachers tell them they are not working hard enough.
Health is also an area where conflicting expectations appear. Our school has a policy that if you miss more than 10 days of school, teachers have the option to fail you in their class. Normally students are told to stay home when they are sick, but as soon as they are absent for more than five days, letters and emails are sent home to parents to warn them of their child’s potential failure if they miss too much school. Students who tend to get sick often have to force themselves to come to school even when they are contagious and feel horrible. If you don’t come to school, it’s expected that you bring in a doctor’s note after missing more than 2 consecutive days. It is often just a waste of time and money after you are told you have the flu or some unidentifiable bug. Obviously this policy is to prevent students from skipping school when they are actually healthy, but threatening students who are actually sick on a regular basis with failure because they are trying to prevent the spread of a sometimes contagious sickness seems like a problem.
Another health related problem that almost every high school student faces is lack of sleep. Teenagers need the most sleep of any age group, between 8 and 10 hours per night, but according to the National Sleep Foundation, only 15% of the 15 million high school students in the United States get over 8 ½ hours per night. In fact, teenagers are actually the demographic that gets the smallest amount of sleep. Teenagers typically are up late on school nights and sleep in on weekends to make up for the long nights, which actually messes up their sleep cycle even more and can result in health related consequences. There are many factors that contribute to lack of sleep, some related to school while others are not. The National Sleep Foundation has found that schools which start later actually have healthier students, because even if the students head to bed around midnight, they get an extra hour of sleep each day. This is just one available solution to help combat the lack of sleep high school students experience on a regular basis.
The final conflict I will mention seeing at our school is the false expectation that students need to be perfect. Teenagers are human and they forget things, just like their teachers do. When a teacher forgets that they had promised to hand back tests on a specific day or post something on Powerschool, students normally are pretty forgiving. However, it seems that sometimes teachers expect students to be perfect and never forget anything. If a student forgets a book in their locker or an assignment is left at home, they are normally chastised for being forgetful, sometimes rather harshly. It makes sense to teach responsibility, but in some cases, the extreme perfection some teachers expect seems to conflict with the respect agreement our school established a few years ago. Students don’t yell at their teachers for forgetting things, so logically that respect should work both ways, because everyone makes mistakes.