Unit 2 Draft

 

Abundant Work or Lack of Time?

Academic stress among Syracuse University students is the result of a lack of time management skills, but mainly due to overly demanding coursework that varies severely based on majors. My research is focused on determining how college students are being treated within Syracuse University. I want to know if students struggle because of a lack of time management skills or because the enormity of work being assigned is unattainable. I believe that it is a mix of both that causes excess stress within people's lives. As a college student, I understand how endless work feels, and I think it has a large part to do with people's majors. I created a survey to gather data on local college students and their personal opinions on the topic. 

Source Analysis #1:

"Time-Management, Google-Survey" by Adriana Stoltman 

My first source is the survey I created on Google Survey to gather real-life data on my campus at Syracuse University. The people that I reached out to were mainly other people in my classes, as well as friends with other majors. The genre of this is a public survey/questionnaire. My results found that people with majors that were within STEM categories found that their coursework was very intense, and they had over 10 hours worth of time spent on homework a week. This is contrasted by majors such as business and communications, which stated that their coursework was moderate and they had a greater amount of screen time than homework time. Overall, I found that majors play a large role in how people feel about their coursework. It is also easier to understand how students use their time when comparing their screen time to that of time spent on homework. If the screen time is greater than their homework time, there might be some evidence to suggest that their stress is in part caused by time management, while if homework time is significantly larger, there may be some evidence to suggest that their coursework is much more demanding. This relates to the larger argument that the stress of these students is caused by their demanding courses rather than time management. Some people stated that they spent over 9 hours a week on homework, just to catch up in their classes. This source does a good job of capturing the feelings/ opinions of many students at Syracuse University. I do wish it asked more questions about where the students' stress comes from rather than assuming based on the numbers. 

Source Analysis #2:

 
"If Students Designed Their Own Schools..." by Charles Tsai, Posted 2014

This short YouTube video delves into High School students investigating their own learning conditions. In Massachusetts, they created this alternative program with about 9 High School students who get to decide how they want to learn, with most of the time no input from adults. The genre of this is a short documentary. This program is called the Independent Project, and it runs only for 1 semester, which is divided into 3 parts, and it only has one rule: design your own learning. These students get to create a weekly question, which they then create a presentation for to teach the class, alongside their semester-wide project that focuses on a personal endeavor. I feel like this learning style really pushes students to take action on their own learning rather than just doing what they're told. The director of the program stated that she wanted to "Stop trying to move every kind of human being through the same gate". I think this really reinforces the idea of individualized learning and was very convincing to hear the many accounts from individual students who were in the program. I think this relates to the larger topic of students' stress by highlighting what students would change if given the freedom. This gives a clear representation of how students would improve school systems to still foster learning while balancing their time. I think this video explains the concept that standardized schooling fails at, which is engagement. If a student doesn't want to learn, they cannot be forced to. I think this source would have felt more reliable if they had given more information about the context of this program.