What I want my teacher to know

To be honest I had trouble thinking of something, at first. There's nothing specific to English class I have trouble with. This is more addressed to all my teachers than just one.

I'm at school or on the bus for 13 to 14 hours a day, and I have 6 classes. 2 are college courses and the rest are high school courses.  All of those classes have teachers that say that their class is the most important and the one I should focus on at all costs. The amount of homework and projects I get reflect this attitude.

Most of my homework cannot be done on a bus. A great deal has to be done on a computer. I do what I can on the bus, but it's never enough to keep from having too much when I get home.

I also have chores when I get home and I still have to eat dinner. My chores take some time to complete, and I have to do those before I do homework.

Sometimes I have light weeks for homework, which I'm grateful for. But every two weeks are so, all of my teachers will assign complex projects that take a long time to complete.

Whenever there are projects, I often stay up to work on it for all of that week. I'm naturally an insomniac, but the insomnia and projects combine until there are days I get 2 hours of sleep and still have to go to class.

We also have to do volunteer hours, which are sometimes fun but take time away from school work. They are difficult to get set up and there's no room for events being rescheduled or cancelled. The volunteer requirement is all well and good, and I enjoy parts of it, but they are also time consuming and the amount we are required to do does not match our workload. If I had the time for it, I would volunteer a lot more than I do. As it is, I have done an estimated 100 hours this year, only to have a small percentage count.

My religion is important to me. I am not Christian, Jewish or Muslim, so many of our holidays do not fall in line with breaks. Since I was 9, I have been training to be what is roughly our equivalent of a priest, and I have recently hit the second of several milestones for this.

There are a total of 8 holidays, and the celebrations largely consist of prayer. These prayers can be long, and some can last for over an hour.

For the past two years, these holidays have all been during project-heavy weeks. If I can't spare the time to go to sleep, I can't really spare the time to pray.

I find most of my classes easy in terms of content, and extremely difficult in terms of time management.  The grades I get- good and poor- all come at the cost of sleep, a social life, time with my family, time to relax and religious observations.

If there was one thing I wanted my teachers to know, its that the assignments they give do have a cost in their students' lives.

I doubt this is a problem at every school in the country, but our school has a lot more complex parts to it, not just the odd schedule, and assignments that would have worked at a typical high school can't always be applied to students at an early college. Every student at this school have the same things demanded of them as most adults. 13 hours X 5 days = 65 hours a week, which is considered a full time job. We also have lives outside of school with it's own demands, just like adults do.

We have adult schedules and demands, even though we are teenagers. Pretty soon, we will actually be adults, but the 'best years of our lives' will have only been demanding schedules and little sleep.

So please, when a teacher gives out another assignment, think about whether or not you would want to have to do it (or be able to do it) on top of the workload and schedule you already have.