Homework Is Too Much Homework

No homework ever again? That would be nice. But, perhaps it’s possible. There are many problems with homework that, if addressed, could persuade school boards to get rid of homework for good. Homework has a negative effect on middle school and high school students because it limits their free time, keeps them up at night, and discourages out of school activities.

Brian Sztabnik’s podcast Talks with Teachers, episode 51 “Is Homework Helpful?” is a quick episode for teachers on the go. Taken from an article written on Edutopia, Sztabnik discusses five questions teachers should ask themselves when assigning homework. Sztabnik begins the podcast describing how much time his young nephew spends forty to fifty minutes up to double that amount when distractions and breaks are factored in on assignments. He cites that the National PTA recommends teachers assign 10-20 minutes of homework for first graders and increases that amount by 10 minutes each year. Consequently, by following this recommendation, students will spend at least 137,160 minutes doing homework from 1st to 12th grade. That equals 2,280 hours or 95 straight days of homework. Students in Finland get around a half an hour of homework but still score very high on International tests.

High school students area bombarded with homework for the next school day. It usually takes a student around 2-3 hours to finish homework (Patel). That time does not include extracurricular school activities or other activities such as family time. When students try to fit all of these things in together, homework usually ends up being the one task that takes forever to do! Some students have to pull “all-nighters” in order to complete the assignment (Smith). The student comes to school the next day feeling very tired and that causes him to perform poorly in class. Currently, schools start at 8:10 and end at 3:40, that is including independent reading time, lunch, classes, and times to get to classes.

After a long day of school, students are tired, stressed, and overworked. This is often something that is ignored when it comes to students of all ages. Homework provides a heavy load that can add additional stress and time on a student’s shoulders. Schools should be making sure that students are receiving enough work throughout the day, to make sure kids do not have the worry of homework when school is over. Students who receive lots of homework, may not have enough time in the evenings to be around family, friends and enjoy the rest of their day.

The debate regarding exactly how much homework is too much homework has been an ongoing debate for years. As of right now, there seems to be no end in sight for this debate. Various adults believe that if children do not obtain homework, then they are not learning properly. However, numerous children are obtaining a substantial amount of homework per night, as well as per each class. Once a child exceeds a certain amount of homework, then it is no longer beneficial for the child’s education. An excessive amount of homework can essentially become harmful to the child’s education. As a result, teachers are struggling with finding the right amount of homework to assign to students. The National Education Association as well as the National Parent-Teacher Association endorse the “10-minute rule” for teachers to follow when assigning homework to students. If a child is assigned an excessive amount of homework, then the child might experience more harm than good when attempting to complete the assigned homework.

Initially homework can take anywhere up to thirty minutes to an hour depending on what you have for homework. If your bus is late or you have to ride another bus you would get home later than usual. Chores can also add time to your afternoon. Once you're all done with homework and chores then you barely have enough free time to do whatever you want.

    With these long school days children don’t have much time to go out and be a kid.  By the time children get home and finish all their homework, there really isn’t much time for sports or spending time with friends and family. Long hours of school put too much pressure on students.  According to the state, students are supposed to have three and a half hours of homework a night. Students are assigned about 17 hours of homework a week. There is a total of 168 hours in a week and 64 of those hours are taken from us by school and homework.  Out of the 24 hours in a day school, homework, and sleep take 18 hours, which leaves students with just 6 hours to do things.  Combine that with sports and after school activities, the average practice for most sports are 2 to 3 hours, which leaves the student with only 3 hours for themselves. If you add dinner into the equation which can take up to an hour ,then students only have two hours a day. Some students also have chores which can take up to an hour or even sometimes more.  What can a student do with only 1 hour of time a day for their personal goals.

Millions of students across the globe have other activities and responsibilities to take care of other than school. When school is released for the day, they expect to have time to complete those responsibilities, but instead they have 4 different packets of homework. In this day and age, you would think school boards would recognize that students don’t only go to school Monday through Friday. Daily homework needs to be limited in order to give opportunity to other students that may want to take on a job or other hobbies.

High school students feel more stress than working adults, and children are beginning to feel aversion towards learning. Both adolescents and children are at risk of health issues due to anxiety and less time is spent with family, playing, and sleeping. The cause for all of this is too much homework that is suffocating students. Homework causes students to sleep less, have more stress, and even forces students to give up extracurricular activities. These negative results can be improved by reducing the homework load.

Envision...You are back in the eighth grade. After a long day of school, sports, practice and music lessons, you had just got to bed a little after one in the morning. Why were you awake until one in the morning? No, You weren’t on your electronics watching Netflix, you were stressing over your homework and your math test for the next day. Why didn’t you complete your homework earlier in the night? It’s not because you were lazy, you didn’t get home from all your extracurricular activities until eight pm. By the time you ate dinner and showered it was nine pm. Then you are still counted upon to centralize all your attention on your essay due the next day and your math and social studies test the next day and your five page

Homework not only takes up time but it pressures and stresses kids out. “Fifty-six per cent of the students in the study cited homework as a primary stressor in their lives, despite the fact that most U.S. students' homework load has remained relatively stable since 1984, according to the Brookings Institute's 2014 Brown Center Report on American Education”(Daily Mail Reporter). “Fifty-six per cent of the students in the study cited homework as a primary stressor in their

High School students shouldn't have more than two hours of homework a night due to sports, work, and their social lives. Just imagine if you had to go to work all day, then come home and go to work again until two in the morning. How effective would that make you in the morning? You would simply just be distressed and unable to work the whole next day and then before you know it you have to stay up and work until two in the morning again. Now relate that to kids and homework, when they have to stay up and do it after a long day that they already had. And after other activities that students have had they don't have time to do that much homework.

On top of too much homework making standardized test scores lower, much of this homework is just busy work (Wolchover). Many teachers ask their student to re-write pages in a textbook. This just causes the student to spend time on something that has no real purpose. Remedial work has no positive effect on students. It just takes up more time ("Too Much Homework Can Cause Stress, Depression and Lower Grades, Studies Suggest"). Even homework that is useful in some way should be limited. Studies show that a student's time is more useful when they play an instrument or a sport. Parent's want their student to be good at many things. It is more important to be a well-rounded person than to ace all of your tests (Wolchover).

Students should only spend enough time on homework so that the subject is reinforced and not just a waste of time. The national PTA suggest that from K-3 grades there should be no more than 20 minutes a day, for 4-6 grades there should be 20-40 minutes of homework, and from 7-12 grades time varies do to types of subjects and number of subjects taken(KidSource). Anymore than these recommended amount of times is seen excessive by the national PTA. Surprisingly U.S. students are working as hard as Asians: 24% of eighth graders do more then two hour of homework compared to Japans 28% and Germanys 17%(Brimelow108). Are we working to hard, researchers don't think so, U.S. student grades are improving. As of 1996 one in every sixth grader does more than an hour of

We’ve all been there, get home and start that night’s homework right away. I work for two hours and it’s time for dinner so I take a 30 minute break and then resume homework. Finally the homework is finished and it’s nine o’clock before I have even showered, get ready for the next day, or just relax. This is all assuming that there are no sports that day or that you have a social life. With all the schools looking to push start times back an hour or two we go to sleep later that much later and still don’t see our family for more than an hour a day. I have done extensive research on the numerous harmful effects of homework and the very few pros. I hope to inform you of the problems of homework and why it should be banned worldwide.