Teachers adjust workloads to lessen stress

April 25, 2016 — by David Fan and Neil Rao

Enter many classrooms this year, and instead of the typical lecture experience that a student may expect, teachers are attempting to reduce students’ stress by making big and little changes in their methods.

After watching a 15-minute video lecture the night before, students in math teacher Lauchlin Loeffler’s room 107 spent the class period asking questions, solving problems on the whiteboard and working together to understand concepts and complete their trigonometry and pre-calculus homework.

Enter many classrooms this year, and instead of the typical lecture experience that a student may expect, teachers are attempting to reduce students’ stress by making big and little changes in their methods.

For instance, some teachers have decided to ease up on homework requirements. Loeffler, AP Calculus teacher Audrey Warmuth and AP Biology teacher Cheryl Lenz are among the many who have made changes to homework loads.

Sophomore Andrew Zheng, who is in Warmuth’s AP Calculus BC class, said Warmuth has made the completion of homework assignments optional. “She strongly advises us to do it, and we still do homework questions on the board, but it definitely helps [because there are] days [when] we can catch up on other homework,” he said.

Such changes especially help juniors as AP exams and other standardized tests overwhelm many students, junior AP Biology student Arjun Mishra said.  

“[The changes] help us cope with the inflexibility of other activities in our lives. With a lot of AP classes, all the tests and work bunch up,” Mishra said.

According to Mishra, Lenz’s class is one that has been shifting its curriculum to include doing more assignments in class rather than at home.

“[The new schedule] means that class time is really efficient, as we can ask questions on anything troubling,” Mishra said. “We do concept packets during class that was normally homework, but by doing it as a class, it improves our understanding because we can go over it better.”

Besides these teachers, history teacher Rick Ellis has given his regular U.S. History students a menu of equivalent homework options. Teachers like Ellis have been experimenting in trying to reduce homework for students as a part of teacher collaboration this semester.

Even though having less homework can also mean having less practice material, students can still learn through a variety of readings, videos and lectures, Lenz said. With the reduced workload, students are expected to use this time to master the concepts individually.

Besides reducing homework, some teachers such as Loeffler have also tried the “flipped classroom” environment, where traditional lectures and lessons are viewed by students the night before doing the material taught in class the next day. This method allows students to ask more questions about the lesson and do relevant problems during class, increasing efficiency and comprehension.

In a “flipped classroom,” it is easier to pause videos and take time to thoroughly understand the subject, sophomore Michael Xue said.

“I think flipped teaching is extremely helpful, though the amount of work stays the same,” Xue said. “By having this addition, teachers are actually very successful in their goals of reducing stress.”

Whether it be in the form of less required homework or flipped teaching, the effort made by teachers to change a class’s rigor has had a strong effect on students and should be carried forward into the future, Xue said.

“With this change, numerous students will feel more stress-free and have a better approach to their academic experience throughout high school,” Xue said.

 

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