When I was in high school, I took seven or eight classes each year, and I was in a gifted and talented magnet program that sent students to the top colleges and universities in the U.S. In order to keep us competitive with high-achieving students across the country, our workload was in many ways accelerated--which meant for most of us hours and hours of homework every night. I fought endless battles with my parents over the many, many math problems I had to solve each night, the lab reports I had to write to prepare for college (where, BTW, I never had to write a lab report as extensive as those I wrote in high school), the essays in Spanish and French, and the extensive reading for all my humanities and social science courses. I grew depressed because of my workload, and my parents, schoolteachers themselves, instituted mental health days, where they occasionally would write me a note so I could stay home from school and just chill--and in a couple of cases use the day to catch up on all my homework.