Is homework really necessary?
Homework is a very fragile topic because teachers and students share very different aspects on if it is necessary. Teachers say it is necessary because it provides extra practice and it keeps lesson on your mind fresh. On the other hand students say it’s not necessary because it too stressful, it makes balancing daily life harder, and many student will not even complete it.
Before getting to my main anti-homework arguments, here is a little bit about what the pro-homework side says. Teachers and staff may argue that homework is good because it keeps lessons on your mind fresh, and it’s extra practice. It keeps things fresh on your mind because as you go home and “study” it, which helps you memorize important key things that you need to know. It helps you get extra practice because if you don’t understand something the homework will show you what you need to understand. No for the anti-homework side. Although there are good reasons homework is necessary, there are also reasons why we indeed should not have homework.
One reason is that is it too stressful. Many students may agree that having homework is stressful. According to Healthline.com, researchers say that 80% of students admitted to having at least one symptom of stress, which may have included headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss, and stomach problems, due to excessive amounts of homework. Another reason homework may be stressful is because as students get too much homework they become very distant from friends from friends and family. The last way students say homework is stressful is because on average researchers say high school students spend at least three hours of homework each night. Think of what other productive things students could be doing with all that time!
Balancing all the homework that students, high school students in particular, is a very hard job. Think about the students with actual jobs on top of homework. How can they balance homework if they have a real job? Another example is students who take care of their guardians or even a child with on average of having to spend three hours on homework and having a needy guardian or child crying it would feel impossible to finish homework. It may add more time to what their doing depending on how frequent they stop. This could lead to loss of sleep, which turns into teens beginning to stress out. Another example is social when they have a lot of homework. This could lead to a decline in their social life and could lead to a very serious depression. As many students struggle to help out around the house and homework is really not an option. According to data I found online, about 1 out of 4 students in the United States drop out of school often due to bad grades, failing, and by extension excessive amounts of homework. In short, homework, which is like a job, a job that students have on top of school and an actual job, which in turn contributes to the stress I wrote about in the previous paragraph, is another reason why teachers should consider giving less of it.
Lastly, students should not have too much homework because they won’t complete it. In Airport alone, 4 out of 5 students say if they get at least more than two hours of homework they will not complete the homework. One student even said, “ I will not spend so much time on one assignment then notice I have two more that I have to start on. I’m just like forget it.” Another student also said, “I spend so much time being cooped up in a room doing homework, then I notice I have been on this assignment for one hour, and I have four other assignments to go and it’s already 9’ o'clock by the time finish. It will be at least 10:30, I don’t have time for that so I just say forget it! I don’t have time for that and just go to sleep,” said Kristian, a current student at airport.
Having considered all the valid arguments that have circled about why homework is good, such as homework keeps lessons on your mind fresh and it could provide extra practice, the arguments on the contrary are strong. Homework is stressful, it’s hard to balance homework given students’ busing social and work lives, and so many people simply don’t do the homework. As a high school student I can especially relate to it being stressful. To conclude, I’d like to leave teachers with a final question: When you assign us all this work, re you really thinking about students and what’s really best for us?