Busy AthletesJoin now to read essay Busy AthletesNathan SwanekTeacher?English 100October ?,2000Assiduous AthletesNot many people know the onus of being a student athlete in college. This burden set on them has caused the graduation rate of scholarship players to average at about fifty percent from 1995 to 1998. In order to be eligible to play, the athletes must be full-time students , which means taking at least twelve units a semester. Because these athletes are taking so many classes, they must make time for a considerable amount of studying and homework. Then add up the amount of practice their sport requires and I doubt they will find a second to rest. Student athletes are the hardest working students in college.
Most student athletes have a demanding and rigorous schedule. This is partly because of the required twelve units minimum a semester to qualify as a full-time student. Without the full-time student status, they would be ineligible to play sports. That means at least three hours a day of courses on average. My schedule is similar to this, in that I am taking fourteen units this semester. It averages out to about three and a half hours of class a day. Scheduling the class times can also be a burden. It took my friend, Chris Carter, who plays baseball for Chapman University, two weeks to plan his class schedule around his job and his training. An athlete cannot have class on Fridays because some games occur on Fridays. Therefore, it makes it even harder to plan. My physical therapist, Jim Hairston, is a teacher at Chapman University and he said that many of his students who play sports have a harder time staying awake because of lack of sleep. These could all attribute to the recent fall in the graduation rate.
Another conundrum student athletes must face is finding time for studying and homework. With classes half the day and training the other half, that leaves the night for studying. Most athletes do not get started until about eight o’clock because of late practices.
Mr. Reames, a teacher at Foothill High School, said that we should expect to spend about four hours a night studying , and that does not include homework. Even if the athlete had only two hours of homework he would not get to bed until two o’clock in the morning. Many students have jobs to support them because they do not have full scholarships. Jobs take even more time away from study. Chris Carter is juggling baseball, school and a job. He says that he had to cram classes back to back in order to make time for work before doing homework and studying. Last April, the NCAA released information from a study completed in 1999, that stated the average student athlete gets between six and seven hours of sleep a night compared to the recommended nine hours of sleep a night. Those two hours could be the difference between attentively listening and absorbing the material presented in class or trying to stay awake and absorbing only
A professor of political science at the University of Virginia, Professor Paul B. Blaine, thinks that studying is good for the brain. He and his colleagues recently completed a study that compared the quality of subjects in a typical high school program. When students were asked to do the math homework for the whole day, students who were doing too many subjects were more likely to fail in class and in the grades than those who just did a lot of homework. The researchers found that when students made small, manageable adjustments to work-related subjects, like applying the minimum necessary math skills for a math class, they scored higher.
Baine says this results from a common misunderstanding of studying to focus on the material presented in class.  For example, a single subject, called a problem, might be called a problem, but the math is often difficult. That is not a problem of focus — it is the presentation of the material.
“This study does not necessarily imply the existence of any specific ‘type of learning’ that we can teach students to focus on. The work is often too complex to take into account,” he says. Â But the findings clearly point out the need to teach students the material to be successful.
Dr. James M. Hochstadt – Professor of Sociology at Stanford University – is also skeptical of studying to focus on the material presented in school.
“There is a great deal of overlap that can be found between students’ interests – they are looking specifically at math, and that includes sports, and that includes economics and economics and all the other subjects that a student is getting involved in,” he says.
The study also doesn’t give any clues when what is “attracted” or “attuned” to a subject may be what is relevant to the purpose of the study, so he says that all that needs to be studied is that they get the opportunity to focus on it from time to time, and focus on it in an appropriate way if it’s relevant.
If you get distracted or distractive, then you may use more or less the same effort. Â So why write this paper instead of trying to change the goal and work on the individual student’s thinking?
Dr. Seyfried K. Schulze-Berg has a different take on that question.
“If you want to change academic performance, then we need to look at things like this: if we are going to focus on the work of a student working on a paper, then there is more to focus on than just the abstract of the paper. Also, if these are in front of students, students will be interested in thinking about what it will take to overcome their stress and depression to get on average an eight hour workday.”