Individuals reflection
We chose to focus on the issue of teachers piling up work within a single week, which has become a serious problem in Year 7, Year 8, and several other classes. Many students are overwhelmed by the number of summative assessments and homework assignments they receive, all crammed into the same week. Some of my classmates are forced to stay up extremely late or wake up as early as 3:00 a.m. to complete their work, and on top of that, we’re expected to revise new topics on our own, which adds even more pressure. This intense workload is causing many students to feel exhausted and even fall asleep during class. As a group, we want our summatives to be more evenly spread out to reduce stress and allow for better learning. Personally, I want to raise this issue with the School Board because I believe real change needs to happen. My team and I have planned to create petitions and distribute forms to different classes to better understand how this problem is affecting students across the school. We also hope to prevent teachers from assigning multiple summatives without considering student input, while making sure assessments are fair and not as stressful as formal exams.
Group reflection
Our Service Learning group is called “HELP US FIX TIME”! Many students, especially in Years 7 and 8 (confirmed), are struggling with the overwhelming number of summative assessments and homework assigned each week. Some of us have had to wake up as early as 3 a.m. or stay up as late as 1 a.m. just to complete our schoolwork, which is extremely unhealthy. Students aged 11–14 are recommended to get 8–10 hours of sleep each night, but with the current workload, that’s nearly impossible. For example, one of our group members, Nicole, had to wake up at 2 a.m. to study for both Humanities and Math assessments on the same day, while also having other classwork to submit. We believe this situation needs to change—students should not have to sacrifice their well-being to keep up with school demands. One of our key goals is to ensure teachers consistently follow the assessment calendar to prevent multiple assessments from piling up in a single week. We are planning to create a petition to present to the School Board and ask them to address this issue, but before we do that, we want to collect feedback from different year groups through physical forms and petitions to show that this is a widespread problem that needs attention.