Dear Editors,

I am a current junior who has been told that I am “not feeling junior year yet” because I’m not feeling constantly stressed out. Apparently ever-present stress and an unbearable workload are supposed to define my year – any other experience is invalid. To be blunt, I am not sure if I will ever feel constantly stressed out; I see junior year as every other year. The issue which drives our collective understanding of junior year is the expectation: everyone expects it to be so hard, so hard it must be.

Sure, your grades matter, but does eleventh grade effort really matter more than the work of years past or future? Should it take precedence over the 8-10 hours of sleep needed for healthy teen development? People are convinced junior year is hard because they are told so, but it’s a ruse, a fallacy, a placebo. If no senior or past junior would have told me it was going to be hard, I would have never acquired to the toxic expectation by which my academic experience is supposed to be measured. Sure, I’m not in physics – but the homework wasn’t so bad last year. U.S. History is tough, but it’s enjoyable–the difficulty is mitigated by a sense of meaning.

Juniors have been complaining about homework for years. It’s grown to exist as an institution in itself, an unshakable constant of complaint and expectation which may be impossible to change. I would rather have a lot of homework because then if I do not do a piece of homework, it will not matter because there are so many other assignments. If juniors want to continue complaining, go for it, but also keep in mind that kids doing homework are also snapchatting and going on their phone (which I am guilty of).

I profoundly doubt that any student putting in a complete effort would be incapable of completing their work. I acknowledge that homework is harder for some people than others, and I might just be someone who thinks junior year is fine. However, I want students to keep in mind that homework is not terrible, junior year won’t kill you, and in 20 years none of this will matter. And remember that however much homework you have, your teachers will still say that it’s harder in college.

Sincerely,

Olivia Garg ‘19