Limit Homework

The amount of homework some teachers give is absurd, especially in many AP classes.

What may be the solution to this you may ask? Well if you read the headline, the solution is to limit the amount of homework teachers can assign at a given time.

There may be many questions such as how much homework should be assigned by which teachers to which students on which days and at what times? There should be an attempt by administrators and teachers to work together to solve this problem by limiting the hours of homework each teacher can assign per night.

I personally dealt with this issue and struggled in the past with my AP Euro teacher who assigned pages of notes along with the reading almost every day of the week which took me 2-3 hours a night to complete almost everyday. And that was just for one class. I also had to complete assignments from other teachers. This led me to lose sleep and not be able to participate in many extracurricular activities and not perform at optimal physical and mental levels. But let's not just take my account into consideration, let's look at the data.

According to the data, teenagers on average get “7 and 7 ¼ hours” of sleep when they really “need between 9 and 9 ½ hours.” Teenagers are not getting the recommended amount of sleep they should be getting which is essential for students to be able to perform at their optimal physical and mental performance levels.

This is largely due to the fact that a large amount of stress comes from trying to balance homework and other duties, activities, and work. This is again backed up by Oxford in that “56 percent of students considered homework a primary source of stress.” This leads to most homework actually being counter productive in many cases due to the fact that students will be more tired and less capable of learning in class and participating.

There are some people who say that a limitation in homework is unnecessary since it is the students’ responsibility to keep up with the class that they signed up for in the first place. Another common response might be that reducing homework would lead to students being more lazy and unproductive with their time.

While these complaints are common, the fact is that many teachers simply do not take into account that students have other classes that they are taking and more homework does not essentially mean that students are being more productive. It can even be the opposite since, in most cases, students feel more stressed out with more homework leading to less and lower quality sleep leading to overall lower productivity as stated before.

All in all we need less homework. We have six classes. If each teacher assigned 30 minutes of homework that is already 3 hours per night. It’s too much and it needs to stop.

Help us improve our productivity and livelihood by assigning less homework.

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