HOME[OVER]WORK

How homework has more negative effects on students than positive.

As the average American teenager comes home from their 8 hour school day, the average adult will come home from their 9 hour work day. However, as the adult begins to relax from a stressful day of their job, the student will come home and do about 2-3 hours of homework beyond their “job” of school. This excessive amount of homework can actually be detrimental to students as it takes over their social life, causes stress, and takes a toll on their physical health.

A lack of a social life in a teenager is actually more harmful to them than you may have originally thought. As teenagers get older, having a social life helps them learn what kind of person they want to be and, if it’s positive, will allow them to do better in school.

Not only will their friend relationships be frayed due to homework, but so will their relationship with their family. During family time, many students will instead be focused on the hours of homework they need to complete. This will force them to miss out on some life-teaching moments as they focus on the repetitiveness of homework which can then cause stress upon the teenagers as well.

In 2013, Stanford University conducted research that showed that students faced with stress from their homework eventually became more unhealthy. 80% of these stress filled students took a survey that said they were suffering from headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss, and problems associated with their stomach which are the physical symptoms of stress. The stress is added when students have other activities that fill their time as well.

Sophomore Michelle Bishop who works at Papa Murphy’s on the weekends, says that even though she works on the weekend, “It can still be hard to get [homework] done due to the sleep I need to make up and working late into the night.”

Bishop is not alone, for other students may not just have jobs to work around, but also clubs, sports, and extracurriculars. When professionals present the idea that homework helps students manage their time and help them learn the content they gained, they don’t take other factors into account. These other activities that students take upon themselves to do like jobs, dates, extracurriculars, and even school itself, is enough of a time management issue in itself. Not only that, but homework makes it so students who have issues with the learning content begin to practice it incorrectly until it is imperfect. Homework is also being given to children in kindergarten, so students begin to dislike school and therefore learning, making school a boring chore rather than a learning experience.

However, students should not be without homework. In Finland, the country with the highest educational ranking, they homework to their students, but instead of giving an average of 10-15 hours of homework a week like in America, students in Finland give only 2-3 hours of homework a week. This means that in a five day workweek, a Finnish student only does a little less than 30 minutes of homework per day for all their school subjects. Finland shows us that we shouldn’t eliminate homework completely, but actually lessen the overload of homework, so students can accomplish more in their life and learn more in school for their future.

Although homework is important to a student’s learning, it is important to know that it can do more harm than it can good. As soon as we begin to lessen this homework overload, we will start to see a positive change in the learning curve, but more importantly, it can improve students’ physical and emotional health.