Math teachers Catherine Lory and Robin Midiri conducted a student survey about how many extracurricular activities students are participating in. The survey results serve as one component of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges report.

“We need to look at the big picture when we’re examining what’s best for students,” Midiri said. “There’s the in school stuff that needs to be addressed…but there is also that extracurricular component that we have no control over.”

The survey was conducted primarily in math classes.

“We just did all math classes because we thought it’d be easier to ask the math teachers. We wanted to try to survey as many students as possible because we didn’t want bias in terms of the classes we selected,” Midiri said. “I figured I’d ask my math homies to do the surveys in all their classes. We got just about all of them.”

The survey was simple: it asked students to indicate how many and which extracurricular activities they were currently involved in.

“I think we came up to about an average of four, like 3.75 extra activities. But there was a decent amount of variation. There were some students who had nine extra activities and some students who had one or none,” Midiri said.

Objectively speaking, Midiri does not want to draw hasty conclusions from these surveys.

“I mean, certainly we were trying to address student stress,” Midiri said. “We’re not talking about causation — all we did was a survey — [but] we just want to try to figure out what are all the variables that might contribute to student stress, anxiety, overwork, etc.”

But as a teacher that has daily face-to-face interactions with students, Midiri is concerned with what these numbers can mean.

“Just speaking personally, yeah, I am concerned about the amount of stress and the amount of volume and the amount students do. Sometimes I wonder, ‘when do you sleep?’” Midiri said.

Midiri acknowledges that most of this stress comes from the pressure to go to a good college.

“The last, I would say, five to 10 years, [has] really kicked up in how competitive things are and the sheer volume of things [colleges] want from you guys,” Midiri said. “It seems like the colleges are requiring you to add more and more to your plate but never take anything off. And that concerns me.”

The survey is just one part of the bigger WASC report that Midiri is trying to put together. She is helped by her co-chair, Lory, and various focus groups made up of students, teachers and staff members. Midiri and Lory are in charge of compiling the information that each of the groups gather.

The bulk of putting together the report consists of writing, and Midiri said that the two math teachers are well equipped for the job.

“Math teachers writing – go figure,” Midiri said. “But we’re good with the data. And that’s important.”