A month has passed since the new school year started and halls are already filled with students complaining about homework. It’s a struggle all students deal with, no matter how challenging our schedules may be. From regular to Honors and AP courses- all classes give homework, and it’s become an unnecessary and stressful task for students here at Hudson High School.
A negative connotation is derived from the word homework. This is not a coincidence. Homework gives students less sleep, less quality time at home with family and friends and a lot of stress. Saying the word homework is already stressful enough. As a student trying to live up to the standards that are set for all students here at HHS: good grades, involved, active volunteer in the community- I know that homework has taken away many chances at me having a chance at a better than ok mental health. I also know that I am not at all the only student at our school that deals with this issue. With so many expectations put on us, it’s very hard to balance all parts of the structure without our mental health falling apart. We become excited on Tuesday nights when we get the chance to sleep in, not because it means more time to watch a show or catch up on some good reading, but because we are able to use that time to do homework. If we don’t use that block for homework due to club meetings or other time consuming activities, our favorite class of the day is study hall, where we are able to finish up some more homework- then we go home and feel strange for one or two days of the week because there’s little homework left to do.
Now it’s obvious all students are different. Some of us may think it’s no problem to do it after school, others finish it the class before it’s due and a few of us simply just don’t do it. Whatever way a student deals with homework it always ends up giving us stress, and we finish it just to say we did it, not because we are eager to learn something. Therefore homework should never be an important aspect of whatever lesson a teacher is trying to teach us. It should never be a chapter or something we didn’t get the chance to cover in class. In other words, homework should not be that important for our learning.
It should be a review over something we just learned in class, or a reminder of a concept we haven’t studied in a while. We students already go to school for seven hours every day. Two days of our week we have classes that last an hour and a half, and the other days lasting 45-50 minutes long. If a lesson lasts longer than the time that we have in class, teachers should save whatever wasn’t covered for the next day, and not expect freshmen or sophomores to teach themselves something that is crucial to their overall lesson in one night. We end up becoming mentally incapable of handling more schoolwork after already being in a school environment for several hours, paying attention in class, taking notes and listening to lectures.
It’s impossible for the human brain to capture so much and be focused for so long. In fact, a study by the APA on how people develop expertise found that elite musicians, scientists and athletes do their most productive work for about only four hours per day. Similarly, companies like Tower Paddle Boards are experimenting with a five-hour workday, under the assumption that people are not able to be truly productive for much longer than that. CEO Stephan Aarstol told CNBC that he believes most Americans only get about two to three hours of work done in an eight-hour day. High school students go to school for seven hours and get an average of 6.8 hours of homework per week, a figure that is much too high according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It’s recommended by experts to have this average go down rather than making it go up. Each grade level starting in the 6th grade gets homework for over 10 minutes each day. After the years go by and we become juniors and seniors in High School, that 10 minutes becomes about 7 hrs each night.
We have been told to do our homework as young as 10 years old. It’s hard to rebel against doing this task with the attachment students have had to it since the 6th grade. We end up allowing ourselves to hurt our own mental health by doing all the work without breaks and having little to no time for ourselves. With extracurriculars on top of school and studying, homework doesn’t do any good for students at HHS and needs to leave. If the homework is optional for improved learning, especially in AP courses or honors weighted classes, homework should then be allowed. In the case of pointless sheets and readings, homework that is simply busy work should not be allowed to be given by teachers. Using class time wisely while eliminating extra work so students can be well rested and therefore more productive during their school days is the best way to have a successful and happy student body.
