INTRO-VO: The last week of school adds a lot of stress on not only students, but teachers as well. The Woodside High School teachers are busy with packing up their things for the summer, grading 150 finals, and having students come to them asking for last minute changes to boost their grades.
VO: Teachers, Ms. Marten and Mrs. O’Brian-Holt, are a few of the teachers who struggle with end of the year. They both work very hard to make sure their students have a low stress environment in the classroom and are well prepared for the final.
SOT: “The end of the year sort of crashes to an end. The hardest part is the sense of timing. They are having a really really good time and then all of a sudden everything is very compressed and you have a lot you want to finish and go over and suddenly you’re faced with having to cut a ton of different things.”
VO: That’s Ms. Marten, an art and history teacher. This is an ongoing struggle for teachers. They each have topics they want to cover, but when the year starts to speed up after Spring Break, a lot of things have to be rearranged to accommodate the end of the year.
SOT: “Students are coming in a lot and I rarely have brunch or lunch the last month of school so I get very little downtime to do work that needs to be done.”
VO: A lot of students tend to realize that they need to get their grades up during the last month or last week of school. Unfortunately, this makes the teachers lives even harder because they can’t please everyone, especially when they constantly stress that students need to come in at lunch and get help.
SOT: “All the students are freaking out about missing or late work and you often have a lot of people begging to make exceptions for them and take their late work extra late and there’s a lot of drama with students being really sad and worried.”
VO: That’s Mrs. O’Brian Holt, an english teacher. The upside that the teachers of Woodside High School raved about is the fact that they get to have a summer and truly enjoy it. A lot of the teachers have families and they are able to have the opportunity to spend time with their kids and not have to worry about work.
SOT: “I like the fact that I still get to have an end of the year. Most adults just work and work and work and they have no end like they get their two weeks vacation and then there’s no end of the year. While teaching you get this opportunity to get a break and then start over.”
VO: Along with the stress of last minute grading, teachers have the heaviness of having to say goodbye to seniors who are leaving and they may never see them again. Most of the teachers have spent years with these students and they get sad when students that they’ve come to know are leaving.
SOT: “You build relationships with students for years and sometimes spend more time with them than friends or family and there is a little bit of sorrow in saying goodbye.”
