It’s 8 p.m. and the school is still bustling with activity. The air vibrates from another run through the SHS winter percussion show, lights blaze in the student center from speech and debate practice, music pulses from the dance studio and the scent of burning rubber wafts from the robotics quad. The last bell might’ve rung, but school is very much still in session.
With the majority of the SHS population participating in some sort of school-sponsored extracurricular, most students spend at least a couple evenings each week back in our hallowed halls. From robotics to sports, no activity is exempt from afterschool practice, and thus no students are free either, which is why having extracurricular activities — whatever they may be — directly after school rather than later in the evening is especially important.
For me, it usually goes like this: I arrive home around 4 p.m., exhausted from another day of class, laden with homework. I sit down at my desk, trying to knock out the hardest assignment first. It takes a little more than an hour, and suddenly it’s 5:30 p.m., and I have debate practice at 6. I try to cram in a quick poetry analysis assignment before heading off to practice, a couple minutes late.
By the time debate is over and I get back home, it’s 8:30 p.m. I make my dinner — a haphazard assortment of random stuff from the fridge because my family is already finished eating and then approach my desk again to see what’s left to do.
There’s a project due next week which will probably take a couple of hours to finish, and another test this week which I still have to study for. By the time I make any progress, it’s 10 p.m., and I still need to take a shower, clean my room and contemplate how behind I am in life — and, of course, try my best to sleep at a reasonable hour.
I know I am one of the lucky ones — with 6-8 p.m. practice a measly two times a week. Some sports practice daily, and winter percussion has rehearsal from 4:15 p.m. to 8:15 p.m. three days a week. It’s clear that such scheduling is something that needs to be reexamined.
We all know that there’s too many things to do and too little time to do them, but there is something to be said about activities which break up our already-limited time into even more inconvenient chunks. So, the simplest solution would be to schedule extracurricular activities directly after school, rather than having them drag on until late in the evening.
By getting all of the activity out of your day before settling in to do homework, students are granted an uninterrupted block of time with which to work. According to a study done by UC Irvine, it takes a person on average 23 minutes to become fully focused on a task.
Breaking up the focused worktime with hours of extracurricular activities can lead to students being overall more unproductive, because their concentration keeps getting interrupted. Students are forced to squeeze work into awkward chunks of time, or they end up wasting the time because it’s too short to get anything meaningful done.
Additionally, constantly being at school until 8 or 9 p.m. means that students are unable to eat dinner at a normal time. Either, people eat really early and get hungry later before bed, or they eat their dinner later — which can actually be bad for getting quality sleep. And for families which do try to eat dinner together, awkwardly-timed activities make it difficult for people to align their schedules to do so.
There are, of course, times where late extracurricular activities make sense — from music concerts to sports games. But ultimately, it shouldn’t be the norm.
And, it might be nice for people living near SHS to know a little bit of peace before trying to sleep each night.
