By Emily Rice
We all know the coveted question, “Is this gonna be on the test?” I’ve heard teachers and students alike laugh when we hear this question. But I don’t think this is a laughing matter. Students have grown to care so much about grades that it’s become borderline, or totally, obsessive. We have come to the point that we care about our marks so much it has become the focal source of anxiety for students.
Students sacrifice so much for grades. We lose sleep, activities, personal time, and mental health, all of which contribute to the continued degradation of students’ state of mind. We do not know how to deal with this. If we focused on keeping ourselves healthy, we would lose the grades we worked for so desperately. Everywhere you look, there’s sacrifice, and on either side, it doesn’t feel right to lose any of it.
We need to find a way to fix it; a presentation about our mental health every once in a while isn’t cutting it. I do not think an entire class focusing on improving the issue would fix the problem either. We don’t need complicated solutions that take more work than they may end up being worth. Educating students is incredibly important, in fact, overwhelmingly important, but this is not reaching the root of the issue.
To solve the rapidly growing problem of mental illness in students, we need to enact social justice. A tremendous change needs to happen on the systemic level. Otherwise, we will not be able to eradicate it. We need to look at the sources of where anxiety comes from for students. When this topic comes up, I often find myself and my friends talking about school. I think we should look at the school systems, look at what’s still causing stress, anxiety, and other related issues and look at what’s reducing those issues.
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