I just recently started my second year of post-16 education. This is my final year of A-levels and I decided not to drop any subjects and instead continue with the 5 I had taken last year. Normally people drop one because A2 (the second year) is more difficult and therefore time-consuming than AS (the first year). Usually people have about 3 subjects at this point in their education although it's becoming more common for people to have 4 and 5.

Anyway I have noticed the past year that I haven't been able to be as active on the interwebs as I would like (being a nerd and all) as I have lots of friends I like to chat with and various community sites I try to keep up-to-date with (like deviantART and GAIA Online). The past year has seen my activity on those sites decline dramatically and I can only imagine it's because of the fact that I seem to have no free time anymore.

So I thought I'd have a look at the number of hours I work to see if I was actually doing a lot of work or just being lazy and wasting my time, avoiding my online 'responsibilities'.

Here goes:

I take 5 subjects at A level. Each subject has 4 lessons timetabled for my school-week. 5 * 4 is 20 lessons a week plus one for our PSE/PSHE/Citizenship lesson. So 21 lessons a week in total.

Each lesson is 1h 15mins long (or 1.25 hours) which means I'm doing 1.25 * 21 hours of work in school each week. That's 26h 15mins. Fair enough, less than people in lower years who have full timetables and do 31h 15mins a week.

However (and this is the killer), this is A level and so it's expected that for each hour you spend in lesson you should spend an hour in your own time doing homework or reading over your notes. This was told to us in our A-level introduction day and has since been repeated to me.

So we double the amount of hours in school for hours in my free time (which include those at home and those in my free lessons at school). That's 52h 15mins of pure schoolwork every week.

You might say that even though I'm expected to do an hour outside lesson for each I do in lesson I wouldn't realistically receive that much work or need to go over my notes to fill up all that time.

That may be true for some A level subjects but when you consider that I take Mathematics, Further Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and German it becomes a bit more realistic.

Some statistics: In the first week back at school I've received (according to what I've put down on my Noticeboard) 12 pieces of homework not including all the stuff that I didn't get done in-lesson. It's probably not that many bits of homework but I know from past experience that they all take a while to do.

Either way I can safely assume that I spend about 52 hours a week on schoolwork.

The average hours worked for women in the UK was 31.4 in 2001 and for men it was 42.2 hours.. So I'm already doing 10 hours more than the average working adult male. The best bit is that European legislation (which has been adopted by the UK) states that the maximum number of hours someone can be forced to work (as in their Employment Contract) is 48 hours a week.

Obviously no-one's defying the legislation in this case because I choose to work this long by my choice of A levels but it still puts it in perspective a little.