Between Thanksgiving and winter break, there are four weeks in which students and teachers return to school to bring the year to a close. Outside of school, people are preparing for the holidays and enjoying their time, getting ready to relax. However, in school, students are doing anything but. With teachers cramming in assignments, essays, quizzes and tests, students find it hard to enjoy this ‘jolly’ time. So how are students handling this academically challenging time?
While school is hard enough, some students are managing this tough time on top of having a job outside of school. Junior Max Tucker is an administrative assistant for a company and helps his director gather information and make sure the employees are running smoothly. “I am a remote employee, meaning I can work wherever I want, whenever I want. I have to work every day and to compensate for the amount of school work, I usually work during advisory and lunch. This week, I took two days off because I needed to catch up on schoolwork.” Tucker said.
Trying to motivate yourself during this time is difficult. Sophomore Ksusha Ulyanova is no exception to this but “I try to motivate myself by telling myself to ‘be the woman that you would look up to.’ Every year during this time assignments and studying pile up and with extracurricular activities, students’ time to do all of this work is minimized. I’ve seen groups of students missing days of school because of the sickness going around, and coming back only to be overwhelmed with more work in their schedule. This time is meant to be ‘festive’ but the term ‘holiday spirit’ does not apply at school,” Ulyanova said.
October through May are commonly known as flu season. Dealing with the freezing weather conditions of Maryland paired with a constant flow of stress, students tend to get sick. This situation worsens when sick students don’t want to miss instructions and class time, so they come to school despite their symptoms. Junior Joy Nadda fell victim to this sickness and missed four days of school. “Coming back to school is extremely stressful. There’s a lot that I’ve missed and even more coming up. The main thing I’m focusing on to manage the workload is talking with and emailing my teachers to find out what the most important assignments are and what I need to get done first. It’s a difficult time but to deal with it, when I have free time, I try to stay off my phone and do something relaxing like reading or taking a shower,” Nadda said.
The key to managing work and school during this time may be transparency between teachers and students. “There’s definitely a disconnect as of right now, communication between teachers and students is crucial during this time to help inform students and to get through this together,” AP Language teacher Annette Evans said.
The consensus seems to be that the only way to power through these four weeks is nothing new: Stay connected with your teachers, prioritize and stay on top of work and try to relax when possible.
![English teacher Michelle Hanson reads through six essays to determine which are written by AI. The use of AI in schools is leading to negative impacts on student learning. "If [students] don’t have to think deeply about what they are doing, they don’t learn and absorb as much as if they had to do it on their own," Hanson said.](https://woottoncommonsense.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/IMG_9465-900x1200.jpg)
