How does the average student spend their day? How swamped are they with homework, school activities, and work? How does one deal with this? Balancing school life with any extracurricular activities like band and sports can be a hard thing to do when you are a teen.
High school students want to experience everything teenage life has to offer, including clubs, the band, and more. However, experiencing these things and keeping grades up without getting burnt out is a tall order 40 percent of Norwin students polled do more than two extracurricular activities alongside their regular schoolwork.
According to the Princeton Review, “High school is a time of significant development and transformation. Students now face fresh difficulties in their academic and social lives. To succeed in high school and beyond, it’s critical to strike a balance between academics and extracurricular activities.”
57 percent of polled Norwin students spend over three hours on their extracurricular activities each week. This, coupled with work, gives students a lot of stress. Balancing out these sides of student life is essential, otherwise you will crash and burn out from trying to do too much all at once.
“Since I’m a senior, we don’t get a lot of homework if we just do our work in class,” said senior Cami Browne. “I mainly try to do my school work in class and than focus on my technical school work, work for the club I help lead, and things for my job when outside of school.”
An important factor in having a healthy and balanced school life is time management. Putting schoolwork first will make it so that you have more free time to participate in other clubs and relaxing activities. You won’t have to worry about trying to remember whether or not you had homework due at 11:59 that night after you are already tired from the rest of your day.
“I could use better time management skills throughout the days and weeks,” said freshman Abby Elliott. “The hardest thing is making sure everything is completed to full potential, and in order to reach that I need to work on seizing every opportunity to complete my assignments.”
Another important factor to make sure is always in your schedule is sleep. It is not only extremely beneficial to your health, but it will help you focus more on your daily activities and assignments. You can get a lot more done energized and ready for the day rather than sluggish and half dead.
“Extracurriculars are like anything else in a teen’s life,” said librarian Katherine Kauffman. “They are important to the growth and development of students, but students must strike a good balance between activities, academics, and work. I think that many of our most high-achieving students have a difficult time scheduling sleep into their routines, which always worries me!”
Almost 40 percent of polled students feel that their grades were sometimes affected by their activities and 13 percent said that their grades were definitely affected by their multitude of activities.
According to East Ohio College, “We understand that finding the time for a break when you have a lot of work to do can seem counterproductive, but breaks are crucial in preventing burnout and maintaining a work and school balance. We do not mean you should take so many breaks you cannot finish your work. Still, we want to stress the importance of taking purposeful breaks, even if it is as simple as not doing any work while eating your favorite meal.”
Taking breaks will help your mind to relax so you won’t burn out trying to get everything done at once. Especially as it’s not just activities and school most high schoolers have to balance, work is also thrown into the equation. If you just relax your mind and don’t think about work or school or any other activities while you do simple things like eating or getting ready for the day.
All in all, making sure that you balance out and enjoy your school life is incredibly important as you are only in high school once. Might as well make it enjoyable; both in the moment and in retrospect.
“Students only get 4 years of high school,” said Kauffman. “so while it is important for students to challenge themselves academically and socially, it’s also important for students to grow friendships and make memories. I don’t remember what I learned in English or Math class. I don’t remember which pieces we played in orchestra. But I do remember exploring Chicago with my best friends while at a music competition, and I remember hosting a new friend for a tennis tournament hosted by my high school. For what it’s worth, those feelings stuck with me all these years later.”
