Photo courtesy of Vecteezy
Students are struggling with their upcoming exams, but they aren’t alone.
On weeks where tests seem to line up, it may be because of teacher-to-teacher planning. There’s a certain period of time where teachers have to set up a goal for their students and create a test at the end of it. This happens once per quarter, and its called the Fifteen Day challenge.
“Teachers decide what those [goals] are amongst themselves. What I do is ask them to fill out this Google Form and tell me about it” Principal Linden said.
Linden describes how the challenge allows teachers to have autonomous planning.
“You have weeks 1-9 to do the Fifteen Day Challenge. And you have weeks 10-18 to do another one,” Linden said. “So they decide on when that is. Now I’m not the one telling them when to do the 15 day challenge, I’m just giving them the window of time.”
About 1 in 6 students in Nebraska experience a mental health disorder according to the Nebraska Department of Education. Although mental health can exasperate stress, students without chronic disorders feel pressure from all sides as well.
“My biggest stressor has to be balancing all of my school work with activities and other things. It gets worse during finals week because I have to spend all of my time studying in order to raise or maintain my grade in a class,” junior Emma Ventura Said.
Troy Steiner, a professor of Introduction to Wellbeing and Positive Psychology agrees with Ventura in an interview done by Jordan Corley for the Collegian. Nationwide, finals are seen to impact stress.
“I think the biggest stress I’ve noticed is that these finals are all coming at the exact same time,” Steiner said.
Corley uses Steiner’s quotes to explain how stress can be managed around the time of finals. Professor Steiner says that students have come to him and told him that they experience more stress during finals. Because he understands when students stress and how it can impair them long term, he trashes the concept of a final exam. In place of the exam is a final project.
“[This] could be stressful, but it’s a positive type of stress because it’s a challenge that they enjoy,” Steiner said.
Although this professor isn’t from Hastings High School, his students’ issues align with local students; both face the most stress when tests are back to back.
“I do feel stressed when tests are lined up,” Ventura said. “I feel like most of the stress comes from trying to squeeze everything in at once. There is so much to study for, and some teachers are still giving tests a day before the finals which means I have to worry about that plus all of my finals,”
Other students in HHS feel this collectively.
“In past years when I had multiple tests in one day I would feel super stressed,” said senior Emma Kvetensky. “It would just be because I felt like I couldn’t fully prepare myself like I knew I could prepare myself.”
With the influx of students from other countries, the student body gets a fresh perspective of their school and stress each year.
“For me personally it is way less stressful here because the tests are usually multiple choice and you can retake tests,” Czech foreign exchange student Monika Janksa said.“In my school back home I cannot retake tests, plus tests are really difficult and the teachers are not as nice about it as they are here.”
Janksa explains how her only stressor is class length.
“I would say that the schedule here is more stressful though because the classes are so long,” Janska said. “Every single one of our classes lasts 45 minutes each, then we have a 10 minute break so it’s easier to focus for 45 minutes for me than longer periods of time.”
Despite this, Janska mentions how she feels free in her education here.
“In the Czech Republic you cannot choose classes, you get the schedule in the beginning of the year and that is what you have to attend,”Janska said. “It is very freeing actually choosing what classes I want to take.”
