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Three high school students discuss academic burnout on their podcast. They share personal experiences and discuss the causes and effects of burnout. They mention a study on burnout among undergraduate students and the importance of grit in overcoming burnout. They also share survey results from their school, showing a high percentage of students experiencing burnout, particularly due to the impact of COVID-19. Test scores have declined and anxiety levels have increased. The students emphasize the importance of perseverance and finding solutions to address burnout in the education system. Hi, my name is Pooja. Hi, I'm Liz. Hi, I'm Sylvia. And this is our podcast, Student Voices. Currently, we are students at Blaine High School, and we have recorded this podcast for the purposes of our CS writing course, called Writing 1301. And this is our first episode on academic burnout. Today we'll be talking about certain systems, causes, and solutions to this problem facing many high school teenagers today. But first, let's get to our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Study Help, an interactive platform where you can obtain the best outlines to optimize your study performance. To find these outlines, please go to www, this is a totally real site, forward slash dot com, to find these free study outlines on the website's main page. Now, on to the podcast. We're all seniors at Blaine High School, and we've all been here for the four years, including our freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior year. Over time, we all have experienced academic burnout, and over time it's also increased. First, before we discuss anything relating to maybe our personal experiences with academic burnout, let me tell you some background information on what exactly academic burnout is. In a study found in the National Library of Medicine's database titled Academic Burnout as an Educational Complication and Promotion Barrier Amongst Undergraduate Students, a Cross-Sectional Study, states that in the 1970s, the concept of burnout was first proposed by an American psychologist named Frudenberger. He used this concept to define the deterioration process and the care and professional attention among individuals. Similarly, university students were faced with a variety of stressful conditions, such as taking examinations and preparing assignments. Thus, the concept of burnout, which was previously applied only to the occupational tensions, got a broader domain covering the educational and academic concerns. The implications that burnout possesses in the modern day is staggering, especially considering the wide range of students who report feeling unmotivated and stressed during the learning process. Liz, do you maybe want to expand on your personal experiences with academic burnout? My academic burnout started in my sophomore year when I transitioned back to full-time high school after being full-time distance learning in freshman year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This period was really stressful for me because I had just come back from basically doing nothing at home in terms of academic life to all of a sudden coming back, having to sit in a classroom for eight hours straight, coming home, having to do four hours of homework, and the lessons didn't transition smoothly back. It was like, you're thrown into the deep end with all of these tough lessons. I agree. This concept of academic burnout is really scary for me because as a senior and having to go into college next year, I'm unsure if this is something that I can fix or turn around by the time I am on campus. I feel like my experience is kind of similar in the sense that I really felt it sophomore year, especially coming back from the pandemic. And then I think junior year, it just progressively got worse. I think a part of that was taking on too much too quickly. I was trying to almost compensate for all the time that I had lost freshman year and get into activities that I had not previously been in and take a lot of classes that I probably in hindsight shouldn't have overloaded myself with. Obviously, I'm very grateful for the things that I learned and I really enjoy the activities that I'm in. But I do think at some point there really should have been a limit in there and I feel like it just snowballed into a really stressful period of my life So I would agree, COVID was definitely a big part and a big contributor of my academic burnout experience overall. I think something that's really helped me in overcoming that is practicing gratitude. And I know it sounds super cheesy to put it like that, but being grateful for the experiences that you're in, even if they're not necessarily experiences that you looked forward to and being grateful for the journey that you're on, good and bad. In fact, academic burnout, I think really, my academic burnout really I think decreased after I started implementing that practice in my life. And I think what concerns me so much is that so many students experience it. In fact, I was reading a study conducted by NYU. Nearly 49% of their student body felt a great deal of stress in their academic life, which is often caused by pressure from parents, a high number of commitments and financial stress. Sylvia, could you expand a little bit? I know you talk about grit later on. Could you expand maybe how these factors kind of contribute to people's grit overall? Okay, so like you said Pooja, there's so many stresses in life, whether it's financial or academic. And I personally have faced so many different contributions of stress, whether it's with academics or whether it's with family, friendships, relationships. Stress is usually all around. Everybody experiences stress, especially a lot of Americans feel like they experience stress on the daily. And stress also not only affects you mentally, but it can affect your work ethic and your grit. So the word grit has been a pretty big buzzword in recent years. And I remember the first time I was introduced to the topic, it was actually my sophomore English class by my teacher, Mrs. Reisdorf. We watched a TED talk made by Angela Lee Duckworth, and she talked about her experience with grit as a teacher. When I was watching this TED talk, it was kind of like I was piecing together pieces that I've always kind of thought of, but I didn't really know how to form it into one cohesive thought. According to New Harbinger Publications, grit is defined as the passion and perseverance for long-term and meaningful goals. So when I learned what grit was all about, that really stuck out to me, and it was really important to me because she talked about how her most successful students weren't always the smartest, but they were the ones who had the most grit. And for basically a lot of my life, for most of my life, I always thought that the most successful people had the most knowledge or were simply the most intelligent, but this changed my perspective. And watching that TED talk, there are a few quotes that stood out to me, but one was, grit is important because it is a driver of achievement and success, and dependent of and beyond what talent and intelligence contribute. Being naturally smart and talented are great, but to truly do well and thrive, we need the ability to persevere. Without grit, talent may be nothing more than unmet potential. I really like this quote because it talks about talent may be nothing more than unmet potential. And people think that just to be successful, you have to be smart or you have to be talented, but if you don't have that work ethic at the end of the day, then you can't really take your talents far. And I think this sentence relates to me because in my personal experience, when I would do standardized testing such as the MCAs or the math tests, I would always land in the exceeds or exceeds the standard region, and I was even in gifted classes as an elementary school student. Although I did well with those types of tests, the problem was really getting my work done and being able to sit down and focus and study. Even though I did great on my MCAs, that didn't really matter. I was placed in harder classes, but I didn't have the work ethic to do the harder work. And therefore, my grades didn't always reflect that. So that's why I stand with the fact or the belief that your grit is more important than how well you are, more important than how smart you are. Grit is a perfect foundation to build up your success. And of course, intelligence and talents are a great way to start that. But at the end of the day, your grit is what's most important. And that's my opinion. So now that we've understood what grit is and how it's personally affected me, let's hear how grit and academic burnout correlate. And let's see how it affected students at our high school. Today, we'll be hearing from our own student body at Blaine High School about their experiences with burnout and the solutions that we can perhaps offer a young generation facing record amounts of anxiety and stress. As Sylvia mentioned, we wanted to get feedback from our peers. So we created a Google Form survey and sent it out to students and staff at our school. 75% of people who responded said that they had experienced academic burnout at some point in their life. And of those people, 75% said it stemmed from COVID, whether that was during distance learning or like it happened with me during the transition back to high school. After looking over these Google Form responses, I was a little curious. And Googled how academic performance has been in the United States these past couple of years after COVID. And I found an article from AP News that said test scores show American students slipping further behind despite recovery efforts. Even though test scores are dipping, anxiety is soaring. Going back to our Google Form, more underclassmen had reported higher stress levels than underclassmen. But this may be due to the underclassmen who answered the survey not being in honors. But that was something that was out of our control. And because of this response that I had from my peers, I went on the rabbit hole on Google and trying to understand really why stress had increased after COVID. And everything ties back to what Sylvia has already talked about, grit. Just during that time of the pandemic, students lost their grit. Students didn't care about their academic burnout anymore. School was almost kind of a joke. Like basically you logged on to your Google Meet, turned on your camera, and you got an A. I remember sometimes I used to fall asleep during a Google Meet and I would wake up to an empty classroom with just a teacher on it. So it was unregulated and it was very easy to get away with losing your work ethic and grit. Hearing about all the anxiety that the student body experiences, I really wanted to offer concrete solutions to these problems. So I reached out to a friend who took a stress management class out at Anoka Ramsey College. And she's here today to speak on some of the things that she learned in that class and good ways she found to effectively manage and get over some of this stress that she experienced academically.