Speaking Task 7: Expressing Opinions

I think is good if the student have a small job. Because of the money, they learn about the money. My cousin she is working in a coffee shop, only Saturday and Sunday. She is buying her own things now, the clothes, the phone, she is not asking to her parents. She is more, how to say, more responsible. Some parent they are saying no, only study. And yes if the job is every day then the homework, the exam, is too much for... yeah. But two day is okay. My cousin she is still passing all her exam.

I think it is okay for high-school students to have a part-time job, but only a few hours in a week. The first reason is the money. Young people want to buy the clothes, and they want to go out with the friends. They don't like to ask their parents every time. A job give them their own money, and it make them more careful with it. The second reason is the experience. You must come on time in a job, and you must talk with the customers and with the manager. That help them later when they finish the school. The marks are a worry, yes, I understand this. Some students are working until eleven at night, and then the homework is not finished, and they are sleeping in the class next day. So the hours must be small. My cousin had a job in a bakery on Saturday when he was seventeen, and his marks stayed the same. And some students are already busy with the sport and the music, so a job is maybe too much for them.

My view is that part-time work should be encouraged for high-school students, but capped, and the cap is where the real argument sits. The case for it is that a job supplies a kind of feedback school is structurally unable to give. A teacher's judgement arrives two weeks later and is softened by the fact that she knows you and wants you to do well. A shift supervisor's arrives within the hour and is entirely indifferent to your intentions. That is an uncomfortable teacher but an efficient one, and students who meet it at sixteen tend to walk into their first full-time job already fluent in it. The objection is a serious one and I don't think it can be waved away. Every hour behind a till is an hour not spent on homework, and for a student who is already struggling, that trade is a bad one. But the evidence doesn't describe a straight line downward. It describes a threshold, somewhere around fifteen hours a week. Below it, employed students tend to do marginally better than their classmates, because a compressed week forces them to plan. Above it, the decline is steep and fast. So the honest answer isn't jobs or study. It's that we should be arguing about the number of hours, not about the principle.