Can you afford the time off to be sick? Can you afford to not stay home?
You are sick. Everyone tells you to stay home and rest, and you happily oblige. Then, you come back to school to discover the amount of missed work you still have to do.
Don’t be surprised, because the world still spins when you are in your sickbed.
The school policy explicitly states, “when you are absent from school, you are required to discuss missed work with your teachers and get caught up.” But catching up is not as easy as it sounds.
Andrew Leung, a Grade 11 student at Thornhill Secondary School, had an appendicitis on Sunday. He went to the ER and had his appendix removed. He then had to stay at home for two days to recover. On Wednesday, he returned to school and wrote two tests.
“It hurts to walk. I can’t laugh,” Andrew says. His body was definitely not up for it though he toughened up and went to school because piling up work is not a good idea.
Although Andrew is only in Grade 11, he already understands the accumulating workload. In Grade 12, there is no time to be sick.
“Grade 12 is brutal and intense. I would come to school even if I’m sick,” Cindy Wong declared, ignoring the fact that she could infect other people around her.
There is a Cantonese saying that goes, “have time to die but no time to be sick”. It is precisely the mentality of most senior students who cannot afford to be a day behind schedule, let alone a few. But there are always the extra studious who manage to work at home when they are supposed to be resting.
“Last year I wasn’t in school for three days. I tried doing my homework at home but I didn’t really understand it,” Joanna But says. Instead of resting, she worked her brain cells trying to answer questions she had no knowledge of, because she missed the lesson in the first place.
Maybe she should have just gone to sleep and forgotten about her assignments until she felt well again. Or maybe she should have just gone to school. On average, a senior student spends 150 minutes daily on homework. If one missed two days of school and did not do anything at home, it is five hours of homework. In addition, there is also the day’s classroom work, making it seven hours in total. In order to finish all the assignments, the student either works faster (assuming the student understands all the concepts) or sleeps later to get it over with. But the next day, the student comes to school and has no energy to focus on new material, because of sleeping late due to late night homework.
It is an endless cycle, at least until the weekend arrives.
Daily Thunder 