Should There be Less Homework?




Everyday, thousands of students run out of their classes and pack their bags with books and folders, trying to make sure they do not forget the homework assignments assigned earlier that day. Within a few hours into homework these students are tired and trying to remember what the teacher had taught earlier that day. Without enough time to understand how to do the homework these young students fail to understand how to properly do the homework. The best way to avoid these risks is to assign less homework and cover more in class during the day.

Teachers need to understand that middle school is a time in a child’s life where they tend to have more extra-curricular activities. Some of these activities include athletics and clubs. It is important to maintain a healthy lifestyle, so sports are encouraged. These extra curricular sports are also important for the child’s development. To be at a healthy weight, you need to have daily exercise or in this case, participating in sports. It also helps in the child’s development because you learn social skills that includes working together as a team. Many scholarships are awarded based on your involvement in extracurricular activities. In today’s world, students have more choices in school than they ever had before. So as the students are active and in their clubs, it cuts into their evenings makes it difficult to get all of the homework completed accurately. Some students may even have after school chores or jobs that cut into homework time. In so many cases by the time they get home and done with their homework, it’s late and the child is tired.
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Staying up late is not good on the child’s health either. Researchers say during your sleep period, the human brain transfers, sorts’ categorizes, and permanently stores all the data it collected while awake. So if you are not getting enough sleep because you are up too late doing homework it can lead to health issues such as this.

The knowledge and the methods of how a teacher teaches its students also impacts homework. For example, there are new methods to complete math problems much different from what they were ten years ago. If you as a student don’t understand the material, and have to ask for help at home, it is most likely our parents will not know how to help because they were taught a different way. But if the parent does happen to understand the homework, they will probably solve it a different way than the student has been taught, confusing the child even more.

If you take a look at households, the school needs to consider the fact that not all students have technology in their home. For instance, computers and internet may not be affordable because of financial difficulties. Because of this, students are not always able to complete their work at home, whereas at school they have the resources, materials and support to understand how to do the homework.

The average eighth grader should have 80 minutes of homework a night. So when you add all this up it’s 14,400 minutes for a school year. I added all the minutes together of homework that an average eighth grader at my school gets, and it came out to be 120 minutes per night. This makes it a total of 21,600 minutes in one whole year! The difference is a whole 7,200 minutes.

The opposing side says we should have homework because it boosts our intelligence level. But little do they know how exhausting these students are after sitting in classes for seven hours, and the extra curricular activities they are involved in.

Based on all of the points made above, homework should be reduced for us and students need to have less assignments given to us at night, and more time should be made available in class to get things done. As stated in the paragraph above, we are over what the average eighth grader has. Homework doesn’t make you smarter, it just makes things more hectic for students given the current lifestyles of families today.

So as you run out of class the next time, hopefully you won’t have to pack as much books and folders into your bag. And maybe you’ll understand your assignments better because you’ll have more time to process them in class. The best way to make sure this happens is to assign less homework and cover more in class during the day.