Essay Sample: Do Students Deserve Mental Health Breaks?

With the coronavirus becoming a factor in school and everyday life for students, an important question to ask is whether students should get mental health breaks from school. The straightforward answer to this is Students deserve mental health days off from schools the same way adults need mental health days. (add one more sentence)

Initially, students deserve mental health days because they are overworked because of school and deserve breaks. Research by Clifton B. Parker of Stanford shows that over much homework every night can become counterproductive. Not to mention, according to the survey, “56 percent of the students considered homework a primary source of stress. ” Homework should be a source of understanding and clarification for students and although it can’t always be enjoyable it shouldn’t cause stress and anxiety. Research shows that some stress is healthy and great to perform well but if students are overloaded with stress because of homework it can hinder their performance. In another study led by Mollie Galloway from Lewis and Clark College, many students say thing's like “ There’s never a time to rest, there’s always something more you should be doing;” “It can feel like you are drowning;”. For something that is meant to aid students to retain information and to aid with tests, it’s shown to overwhelm students, and too many feel as if there’s never a time for them to do something outside of school. Having time to spend with family and friends is absolutely crucial for the development of the brain.

Taking the pandemic into consideration, the mental health of many students has been declining, and school has been piling on to the many stressors students have at the moment. In a recent study from Harvard, “...about 27% of parents and roughly 14% of children are experiencing worsening mental health problems during the pandemic.” Although 14 percent isn’t the majority of students it’s still a large portion of them and as mental health declines, the positive performance of students also decreases. Several students have also reported that the pandemic has hindered their ability to learn and stripped them of motivation. If students receive more breaks and teachers and family encourage them then the mental health crisis in students may decline.

Although these arguments are compelling many teachers and teachers may argue that students already have enough breaks as it is and if this continues they’ll continue to lose crucial learning time. While speaking about the gaps in learning between Latino/black students and Asian American/ white students Nio Gao of PPIC states, “These trends are cause for concern as distance learning continues, threatening to widen racial and socioeconomic disparities as many students fall further behind,” Before the pandemic, there was already learning gaps between them but now students in lower-income communities are falling more and more behind and allowing more unnecessary breaks would just make that gap worse. Although it is true that students may be losing more learning time over time if they continue to be force-fed information they can’t retain with no breaks it creates a terrible environment for learning. When students are put in a minimally stressful learning environment they feel more compelled to learn and retain information.