By: Julia Michaelson
Students in honors classes always have been pressured to have the best grades. Not only by teachers, but parents. It’s outrageous. Teachers assign 30 minutes to an hour of homework in their classes each night, so that’s about 2-4 hours of homework for just honors courses, and on top of that,the majority of high school students have an extracurricular activities after school. This leads to an unhealthy amount of stress for students during the week.
These students need to be able to have a balance between fun and school but instead have a great deal of stress all the time.
No question about it, the majority of students deal with stress during the school year.
According to Denise Pope, a psychology researcher at Stanford,
“Too much homework can negatively affect kids, especially their lives away from school, where family, friends and activities matter.”
When teachers decide to give students a large amount of homework, this impacts their entire day, sometimes even their entire week. Most students have after schools activities that go on until around 5-7 p.m. Then those students have to go home and eat dinner. By the time they start doing homework, it’s 8:30! With 2-4 hours of homework, these students have to stay up very late. This won’t allow them to get to full night’s sleep ,7-10 hours, so they will be tired in school the next day and therefore won’t be as focused.
Annie Cotton, sophomore at Hershey High School, doesn’t see the point of homework. “Most of the time it’s all just busy work that will take me hours to complete,” said Cotton. Her view on homework is the if the teachers would give out work to see progression or regression than it’d be helpful. Cotton believes that the teacher needs to focus more on reviewing work so the homework wouldn’t be a waste of her and other students time.
“Most of the time I think teachers just give homework to give us something to do…they think we don’t do anything,” said Cotton.
Michelle Kindt, a French teacher at Hershey High School, has the same view as Cotton. Kindt believes that homework is for expanding in your learning. “Students should have the ability to choose what they do on homework,” said Kindt. Some people learn differently so homework should be based on how they learn and Kindt agrees.
“Homework should not be busy work. It should help students not hurt them,” said Kindt.
For Cotton it hurts her. She’s on the girls basketball team and has basketball two and half hours to six hours of basketball a day monday through friday. On top of this, she has 3 hours of homework a night. “This takes away from my time with my friends and family,” said Cotton. She says she always feels tired in school and can’t focus, so homework is hurting students like Cotton and not helping them.
As a result,teachers need to stop stressing out students with busy work. Homework should be a positive and expand student’s learning not slow them down. Each class should only give 15-30 minutes of homework per night or one project that students have a week to complete. There won’t be as much stress on students and they will be able to get the right amount of sleep to focus in class.
