Wednesday morning, 10 a.m.. A crowd of slouching, baggy-eyed students stumbled into the fourth floor gallery while the junior grade heads, Upper School English teacher Mike Mahany and Upper School Learning Resources teacher Bridget Walsh, patiently waited for phone screens to click off and mouths to shut. Only five minutes into the forty minute period the word “homework” slipped out of Mahany’s lips, and immediately cries from the crowd began recreating the chaos that Walsh and Mahany had just suppressed minutes before.

Simply utter the phrase: “junior year,” and shudders will likely run through the spines of a number of Upper School students at Parker. Junior year has become infamous for piles of homework and sleepless nights. “You walk into the year thinking, ‘I have to do better than I’ve ever done before,’” Mahany said. “Students put pressure on themselves, and parents put pressure on them, because there is this myth that junior grades are the most important grades.”

Not for senior Maya Sanghvi. “To me, junior year was the easiest year,” Sanghvi said. “What gets into students’ head is that these grades are the most important and that everything I do matters.” According to college prep websites such as “Transcript Maker” and “Prep Scholar,” junior year grades have no greater significance than that of freshman or sophomore grades.

Still, a substantial portion of the junior class continues to petition for a decrease in their homework load. Is this justified?

“Homework is critical for me because it provides kids background to the next day’s lesson and without that background, kids come in too cold,” Upper School history teacher Andrew Bigelow said, “so I need them to come in warmed up by that material so we can get so much more out of them.”

In the midst of this “perfect storm” of SAT/ACT, hard classes, sports and extracurriculars, and the last chance to boost your GPA before college application, students find themselves in a state of panic, according to Mahany. Junior Simran Jain noted how even before the year had begun, she could tell the junior class was already beginning to panic. Senior Ray Blickstein thought differently. He said,“I really felt that sophomore year was harder than junior year.”

A Google form survey sent to the 84-student junior class yielded 39 responses ranging across the spectrum. Some students felts that other Parker juniors were quick to “needlessly complain,” while others felt that the amount of homework they received each night was “killing them.” 21 of the 39 students said that they spent three to four hours working on homework during a weeknight while another 11 felt they spent up to five to six hours a night. The other seven said they spent less than two hours a night.

If homework is taking someone more than an hour to do, then they have to communicate with their teachers, according to Bigelow.

“I feel comfortable telling a teacher I’m spending more than an hour on work,” junior Jade Rasmussen said, “but I don’t feel I have the right to ask them to change the workload.”

A cohort of teachers, who teach primarily junior classes, are currently discussing the feedback from students and seeing how they can help the juniors manage their workloads. “I’m not skeptical, but we have been talking about it a long time, and we haven’t done a great job in cutting down the work,” Mahany said. “I’m hoping that between the grade heads, the cohorts, and students talking to Mr. Brandon, and Mr Brandon’s interest, that we can start accomplishing something.”