What do you want to be when you grow up? Where do you want to go to college? What are you going to major in? These are just a few of the many questions juniors and seniors are hammered with.

It’s that time of year again: juniors are ripping their hair out because of their workload, seniors are still undecided on where they want to spend the next four years of their lives, and parents are dealing with the stress of getting their kids ready for “the real world”.

Who is really at blame for all of this stress? Is it the school for assigning such a difficult curriculum for juniors? Is it the seniors for having a bad case of senioritis and procrastinating? Personally I believe parents and teachers are to blame.

Starting my junior year, I was not all that worried. Freshman and sophomore year were a breeze, and I managed to get 4.0’s. Then, it all came crashing down. Summer work, projects, pop quizzes, essays, physics, preparing for the AP exam, homework every night. Adjusting to the workload was a living academic nightmare.

The problem of overwhelming school stress starts at home. Now more than ever parents are putting pressure on their children to succeed in the future.

“As juniors in high school, our parents have such high expectations for us because our grades have become a crucial factor for our futures. Every decision we make affects what colleges we will be accepted into,” junior Ashley Dawe said. “Our parents put extreme pressure on us to succeed because they want the best opportunities to be available to us in the future.”

Yes, our parents only want the best for us. On the other hand, is it truly necessary to hammer us with questions every day? Not only parents, but any adult. I simply can’t go anywhere with an adult without them asking me about college. The answer is: I simply don’t know! Teenage girls can hardly pick out an outfit in the morning so  how can you expect them to have their lives planned out by the beginning of the school year?

The next part of the pressure comes from our teachers, especially now in light of the newly implemented block scheduling. Juniors who are taking on level and/or AP classes have some form of homework every single night. That is a fact, not an opinion. A typical junior last year would most likely have homework every night, but with block scheduling, many teachers feel the need to assign double the homework.

I understand we now have two nights to do our homework. Realistically though, we cannot work on the homework assigned that day because we have a ton of other homework to work on that is due the following day. There is simply not enough time in the day. Some teachers have the incorrect mindset that their students are only taking one class: theirs.

Not to mention student athletes: students who play sports have practice right after school until 5:30 and may not get home until 6:00, eat and shower and by the time they get to their homework, it’s already 8:00. Those students will go to bed at 12:00 and will not get an adequate amount of rest to do it all again the next day.

Pressure on juniors and seniors surround us in our daily lives. In conclusion, parents and teachers should both lay off a little and understand the stress of high school. It will ultimately make our lives, and theirs, a little bit easier.