Imagine going home knowing that the next day you will have a lot of homework to turn in, as well as tests to study for. This already sounds bad enough, but if you have extracurricular activities to do that day, the stress builds up. The time you have to finish your school work will be decreased, and once your extracurricular activities are over, you will have less energy to finish your studies. I told you to picture it in your head, but most of you don't have to. That's because you've probably experienced it almost daily every day after school. Have you ever wondered why we go to bed so late and why some of our teachers don't? Have you ever thought about how much stress we are all under, compared to how much stress our educators have? Has it ever crossed your mind how high expectations are from everyone and why our mentors don't have to live up to them? I'm sure at least one of these has crossed your mind a few times before. Students of our generation are expected to handle excessive stress for our age; so much so that we might even work harder than our teachers! Honorable judges, teachers and fellow students, with all due respect, today I will demonstrate exactly why we students work harder than our teachers. First of all, let's take a look at what a student's after school schedule might look like. We're expected to be well-rounded, right? This means we should get good grades in school, as well as be healthy, fit, musical, artistic and involved in the community. If we try to fit these expectations into our already busy schedule by playing sports or learning a musical instrument after school, much of our homework and study time will be used up. Students end up… halfway through the paper… an iatric patient in the early 1950s? It is truly alarming that if we had become so stressed about our school work some sixty years ago, we would have been considered mentally insane. The mere fact that we could be accepted as psychiatric patients in the early 1950s is more than enough to prove that we work much harder than our educators. Adding in our intended quest to become well-rounded and learning drastically harder things every year further proves this. Students miss out on a lot of the sleep we learn we need due to the amount of work and studying we need to complete. Our whole life turns into preparing for exams and completing homework, with no time for anything other than homework. They say your high school years will be the best years of your life, but how can we have the best years of our lives if we spend them working harder than our own teachers??