Appropriate Activities for Learners

Post date: Mar 31, 2017 6:24:36 AM

By: Gemma Miranda Manalo, TIII

Bataan National High School

Students undoubtedly have a bunch of work to do whether they stay at school or at home. They sometimes tend not to sleep or eat which may cause immunosuppression that can lead to different sickness. Health and cognitive development of students are at stake.

With what is happening now, students are often given various tasks which are seriously difficult for them. Most of the time, the projects take up too much time of the students which sometimes leads them to stay awake from evening until morning, or worse skipping classes to finish a paper.

Today’s current curriculum is primarily student-centered which basically gives the students opportunity to gain knowledge by themselves. However, some seems to cross the line and just gives activities regardless of how they will finish it.

Aside from the students, the primarily affected by increase in workload among students are their parents, especially those who sent their kids to public school because they can’t afford to bring them elsewhere. Similarly people who barely have their ample amount of packed lunch for them to survive the whole day, those parents who can’t even buy slippers to protect their child’s feet from the scorching heat of the sun. Yet, they still have to pay a lot for different fees like for example, their costumes for plays or sometimes the printing of their papers.

All those activities, may be beneficial for the students as we see it, however, it seems that it does not really help them learn. Most of the time, they go to school sleepy because they roughly had enough rest the night before. They go to school trying to have the lectures sink in to their minds with their poor bodies slowly collapsing.

According to a study by Henry Schwann of Concord Journal which was conducted in Harvard and seven more universities, academic workload was a primary reason for student stress having suicidal thoughts on the rise as eight percent of respondents admitted to having planned on committing suicide due to stress that they cannot handle anymore.

Furthermore, when school works tend to pile up, students tend to multitask in order to finish all their errands but they are actually just wasting their time by switching from one task to another. Researchers at University of Sussex in United Kingdom, found that high multitaskers had less brain density in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region responsible for empathy as well as cognitive and emotional control.

School should be a house for learning, by means of quality education and not by pressuring the students through tons of irrelevant activities and bulk of school works which they are forced to comply with. At the end of the day, their grades will either define whether they did not study very well or the teacher did not teach them well, but the worst thing is the wellness of the students are at stake.