Whether you've just come from
an after school club, a sports practice or hanging out with friends, we all
know that feeling after school when your mind has been rung out for a little
more than 7 hours of school. We all know the dread of having to face our daily
given burden: homework. Many of us have begun to feel like homework is
taking over our life outside of class.
High school teachers aim to
assign high school students an average of 3.5 hours of homework per week. That
may not seem like a lot, but consider that students may receive homework from
at least five of their teachers. Once, you take that into account, high school
students receive approximately 17.5 hours of homework a week. Divide that by
the number of days in the school week, not counting weekends, it averages out
to 3.5 hours of homework a night.
In a 24 hour period during
the school week, the average high school student spends approximately 7 hours
at school, 2 hours getting to and from school, 5 hours doing daily things like
eating, dressing, and showering, and 8 hours of sleeping. All together, that’s
22 hours out of the 24 hour day, leaving only 2 hours in the day for students
to spend time on homework, after school activities like clubs or sports, family
time, and relaxation. However, high school students are given 3.5 hours of
homework a night by our previous calculations, which leaves no time whatsoever
for students to relax or enjoy things that spark their interest.
So why are we spending so much time on
homework? During the 1960s when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik
1, The U.S. Department of Education upped the amount of homework students were
required to have per week in fear that U.S. students in the U.S. were not being
educated enough. This was merely of act of one-upping the other side. Back
then, homework was simple memorization and not as complex as the homework
today. These days, teachers assign students much more complex assignments, but
they have not decreased the amount of homework that students are receiving.
High school students are gaining the same amount of homework, but it takes much
longer to complete the work.
Homework is not a bad thing. It
allows students to practice their skills outside of class, and it’s been proven
to help students gain time management skills, learn responsibility and
perseverance, and build up their self-esteem.
However, a study at the Stanford
Graduate School of Education found that too much homework can diminish its
effectiveness and counter the benefits. Too much homework causes students to
experience greater stress, which can lead to both mental and physical health
problems like sleep deprivation (insomnia), anxiety, weight loss, and constant
headaches. Not only that, but like we established earlier, students do not have
enough time in their 24 hour day to engage with friends, family or pursue their
interests, decreasing their social and extracurricular skills, and thus they do
not have a way to diminish their stress. The stress continues to build up, and
students may develop a lower self-esteem and a tendency to procrastinate.
The quality of the homework does not need to
decrease, but the amount of homework does. Teachers need to take their students
into consideration and assign less homework so that they can safely manage
their time between their interests and their schoolwork. Alternatively,
teachers can give students more time to work in class so that they will have
less to do at home. Students need to find a way to balance homework,
extracurricular activities, and social time on their own, but they will never
have the chance if teachers keep assigning the amount of homework that they do
now.
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