“Is it too early in the year to have a nervous breakdown?”- A freshman In my Biology Honors class, five weeks into the school year.

High school is difficult, especially for all the incoming freshmen that are all too eager to start the school year with the “big kids.” Freshman year is, from my own experience, once of the worst years of high school a student will ever experience. It’s filled with peer pressure, the sudden rush to turn things in, the heavier amount of work, and the pressure from teachers and family to succeed.

It should not be hard enough to cause a student to have a nervous breakdown five weeks in. School should not cause mental and emotional trauma that is inflicted from intense amounts of work that include ridiculous due dates and fine print to every single grading rubric. It is supposed to be a safe environment that we can learn in and respect ourselves in. Yet, if you were to google “school is…” you will be greeted with responses of, “School is H***,” or “School is prison,” and even, “School is bull****.”

Such responses should not be a student’s opinion of school, especially high school. These are our last four years of school, only legally being forced to do two years if our parents can sign off upon us wanting to drop out at sixteen. These last few years can literally make or break us, and more students than believed have had complete breakdowns because every class is asking more than needed of the student.

Yes, students have the capability to perform many tasks that require thought and reason and yes, students should never use a mental illness or any of such as an excuse to not perform well in their classes. This is a pure fact that cannot be debated against; you should always try in your classes to try and better yourself, because it’s better than allowing your mental illness to eat at you.

Teachers should be more aware of their students and also of the workload that they pile upon them. Teachers always say something along the lines of, “I have 120 students I can’t think of all of you!” But they are the ones who fail to understand all it takes is relaxing, even if only slightly, on the workload they tell students to complete along with the workload from their other classes. Sometimes all it takes is a teacher acknowledging this epidemic among students and giving them the reassurance they desperately need to keep going strong through the school year.

When does a student function best? When they are relaxed and sure of themselves in their work. Teachers need to begin discussing this at meetings instead of how to makes EOC’s and quizzes harder for us to “expand our knowledge” when in reality they are simply expanding the wave the stress and insecurity students hold in themselves. Students are the next teachers, doctors, officers, civil rights activists, writer, etc. and we won’t be if we fail our classes from stress. We have the ability to change the world, if only our teachers gave us that reassurance.