Junior Toni Diaz misses a full day of school a week due to golf. Not only does she miss school for her sport, but four out of her six classes assign homework every day, so she always has homework. She stays up doing homework after practice for two to three hours each night.
“On top of missing school, I also got sick,” Diaz said.
Covid is making a comeback! Also, with flu season coming in hot and heavy, admin guarantees that there will be a spike in absences.
“I am normally a straight- A student, but now I have all B’s and a C”, Diaz said, while describing her struggles as a student-athlete.
Dean of Students Señor Juan Antonio Santisteban and Karen Sheehy, who specializes in student attendance and its causes and effects, provided the following attendance data from the week of October 2:. 51.83 percent of people had zero to one absences, 24.13 percent of students had one to two, 15.2 percent had two to three, and 8.8 percent had four or more. 48.17 percent of students had at least one absence a week. 275 people missed first period that week, which includes the bulletin, and any important announcements made to the students. 234 students missed the second period, 234 missed third, 269 missed fourth, 281 missed fifth, and 290 missed sixth.
Another student who misses a lot of school due to extracurricular activities is AHS FFA Vice President senior Caterina Morones. She described how she misses about 2-5 full days of school every month due to FFA.
“Next month, I’ll be missing seven days out of the month for the National Convention,” Morones said.
To be able to participate in school-organized activities, students need to have a 2.0 GPA or above. FFA members make sure to prioritize their homework so they can participate in all of the FFA events, trips, and activities.
“We actually have designated homework times on the trip to keep us on top of things,” Morones said.
Your grades, or what you want for your future, could dictate the classes and academic route you decide to take. Those routes could include assignments every night and tests every week, or they could include no homework and no tests and just in-school participation. It is interesting to hear why teachers do or do not assign homework.
“I don’t assign homework because I think it’s important for students to have a break and downtime. I also found that the homework I assigned didn’t influence how well they did in the class anyways,” French teacher Davena Bagnall (Madame) said.
Seniors Melanie Luh and Oscar Carlson are student-athletes with rigorous course loads, each having at least three assignments of homework every night.
They described how understanding teachers are with extensions for student-athletes, from their own personal experience.
“It’s definitely different, case by case, for each teacher, like some are more understanding, but some are definitely not,” Luh said.
Carlson thought that a teacher with a background in sports and extracurricular activities may be more understanding than one without.
“I think its perspectives, going back to even when they grew up, how they were in sports, or how people in sports treated them,” Carlson said.
The lack of sleep, workload, and amount of time for school work is troubling to some students. Let’s hope you get lucky and can get ahead of your late work.
“I stay up until about 1:00 to 2:00 a.m. every night, 12:30 on a good day,” Luh said.