Is homewrok causing more harm than good?

[10CJiSoo]

1) www.cnn.com/2014/03/21/health/homework-stress/
2) www.parenting.com/article/too-much-homework-bad-for-kids
3) www.today.com/parents/schools-try-no-homework-policies-amid-complaints-about-overload-1D80128324

I think it is safe to say that we have all experienced days when we were forced to endure hours of what seems like endless homework. Many teachers and parents would argue that homework is an essential part of our education, and that it is completely necessary. Apparently, it encourages time management, improves our memory, improves study skills, and is a good way to practice what you didn't understand class. After 12 years of having to endure the huge pain of homework, I have been wondering how useful homework truly is to our education.
Homework is supposed to teach us how to use time wisely, and stop procrastinating. From personal experiences, I find this completely false. It is a very well known fact that everyone, no matter what age, has a tendency to procrastinate tasks they dislike. How giving student 5 hours of homework each night is supposed to improve that, is beyond me. It is a pretty well-known fact that most students end up putting projects, no matter how big and how much time was given, until the last minute. The day before the due date becomes a stressful day of pulling an all-nighter, and handing in a sloppy, rushed assignment. In the end, no improvement in time management whatsoever. Also, because we all consider homework as nothing but a chore, we eventually stop trying. We search up answers online, copy off our friends, and regurgitate information from the textbook. This obviously does nothing to help memorize information or improve our study skills. Although homework can be a good way to practice topics you did not understand at school, most students are not willing to teach themselves the whole 45 minute lesson. Also, isn't making sure we understanding the topic the teacher's job anyway? What is the point of school if we have to learn everything all over again after we come home?
On top of this, homework can take away so many hours from our day that can be used doing something much more productive. For example, students can join a sports team, volunteer, or take a class in what they want to pursue as a job. This can teach students many life skills and lessons that are simply not taught in school. According to a CNN article (first article), too much homework makes student literally sick. I was not surprised by this at all. Too much homework leads to not getting enough sleep, which is obviously unhealthy. It will also lead to a lack of focus at school, which is negatively impacting our education. The stress of homework can also lead to constant anger and depression, which is mentally harmful. Besides this, because the amount of homework takes away our free time, it does not allow us pursue activities that are crucial to our health, like exercising and socializing. Is writing a 10 page essay or making a poster about birds really more important than our own health? Too much homework can also cause children to learn to hate school as well, which eventually leads to a disinterest in learning (first article). Who would enjoy a task that does not allow you to have any fun anyway?
It is clear that homework is a part of every student's education. It is questionable however, how useful it is to students in the end. However, many schools are starting to ban homework (third article) due to the belief that it is simply a waste of time. What do you think? Is homework a necessary part of learning, or is it just a chore that wastes our time and prevents us from doing what is really important?

[3zrheanna]

Though I believe homework is an essential part of our education system in order to fully review and comprehend material learned in class, the amount of it that high school teachers typically assign their students is absolutely ridiculous. Even for the best, most motivated students, schoolwork is incredibly time consuming.. in a way that is no longer helpful to students. In fact, I believe that by assigning hours worth of homework assignments, teachers are actually veering from the purpose of the assignments in the first place, and causing more harm than good. I can't even count how many entire nights I've wasted "completing" assignments I didn't understand, just rushing through it because it was physically impossible for me to do each and every one with the effort I wanted to put into it. This takes a toll on the mental and physical health of students. Mentally, it is just exhausting to have to do homework in every class (for the typical LaGuardia student, 8-9 classes), study for upcoming exams (sometimes more than 4 in a week) and complete any other projects or assessments assigned by their teachers. I myself have had many emotional breakdowns late at night, realizing that I was assigned much more work than I was able to keep up with. It isn't healthy for teenagers to be under so much pressure that they are constantly living in fear of falling behind. This mental exhaustion also has more consequences than people realize, students falling asleep in class from staying up late doing homework, skipping meals because they don’t have time to sit down and eat. This year I’ve skipped almost all of my lunch periods to go to the library and finish homework I fell asleep doing the night before.
Is that healthy? No.
Do I have a better understanding of the material I’m learning? No.
It needs to be brought to the attention of high school teachers and administrators that their students are suffering under unecessary workloads, and that if the policies on homework are not changed or limited in the near future, it will be detrimental to both the school and the future of their students.

[10ganja]

I completely agree, I think that the amount of homework given to students is unrealistic and, sometimes, an absolute waste of time. This is not to say that homework should be banned altogether, because it's still vital that students come home and take a little time to review aspects of the topics they learned that day in order to achieve a more complete understanding, but more homework does not equal more understanding. First of all, no one in their right mind could possibly find the motivation to come home after an 8-hour school day and complete another 5-hour workload. It's unreasonable, and frankly, ridiculous that school officials and the DOE believe this could actually be progressive toward students' education, since the mind and body need to rest and reenergize. Physical activity is incredibly important for children and teenagers that are developing, and after sitting in a desk all day long, students are naturally going to become agitated and jumpy. They need to move around and channel their energy into motion, whether it be through a school sports team or something recreational outside of school. If schools came to accept that homework is more helpful in small doses, our youth could find more time to involve themselves in something enjoyable as well as beneficial, which could spark their desire to become more productive throughout the rest of their day and focus better in school.

As important as physical health is, mental health is arguably even more important. Students have grown up in the age of computers, and much of the older generations will debate that with the resources available to us, it is easier for us to access information and use it for our studies. What they don't realize, however, is that although we are lucky to have these advantages, the world has evolved with the computer, and students today are expected to think and process and respond with the speed of a computer. We are machines, expected to take in information and regurgitate it in well thought out essays that have little relevance to any of the real issues today or any meaning to us as people. The whole point of getting an education is acquiring knowledge in order to put it to some sort of use and better the world around us. When you ask a generation of people to consistently take all of their individual thoughts and opinions and direct it at a topic or subject that means nothing to them, of course you are going to see a decrease in quality of work. Students are stressed out and overwhelmed with unrealstic expectations of success that define them as a series of numbers on a sheet of paper. They spend their days holed up in classrooms, then come home and plant themselves at their desks and are supposed to answer questions for another couple of hours. Students need to be injected with a little more life and passion, and slaving over hours upon hours of dreaded homework that does little to actually teach them anything more will only create a generation of zombies that cannot find the enthusiasm to do anything meaningful if it is not required, effectively wiping out the potential for progress in any field. Lessen the unnecessary workload, and see how students will blossom.

[6dmaya]

I think that the discussion of the value of homework is very interesting and it is an important one to have. As we look to reform the education system in the U.S. itself, we must zoom out slightly more and look at the things we associate with education or "schooling" in general, one of which being homework. Although homework has been drilled into our minds ever since preschool as a fundamental part of learning, this may not be entirely true in every case.
First off, I think there is an essential distinction to be made- busy work vs meaningful work. I know that the lines tend to blur between the two, but I'd like to think that overall, busy work should be ruled out of the world of homework giving possibilities. It is simply a waste of time for a student to do busy work just for the sake of having homework. With meaningful work though, everything seems to get much more complicated. While there is not nearly enough time for a teacher to teach every bit of content and fit in practicing that content and getting comfortable with that knowledge in the classroom (especially with periods of 45 minutes), homework is often a tool meant to help students with the process of learning. The concept of practice is an absolutely paramount feature of learning and improving at anything. This is where I empathize with teachers who regularly give hours of homework a night or those who speak of homework's benefits. So I think that a lot of the student fury about doing "pointless homework" is generally misdirected. Especially in high school, I find it fairly rare that homework is just assigned for the sake of homework or in order to be a chore (as much as it may feel that way as a student). What should be revisited is the frequency that we are given homework during the week and the amount of homework we are given in each class.
At this point, the intentions of homework are lost because it takes much more away from us than it gives us. After over an 8 hour day at school, students should have the opportunity to explore the world and have an out of classroom learning experience. It is quite limiting to have time constraints forcing you to go straight home and sit in another room doing work on paper. Not only is it limiting but it takes away all of this potential time to exercise, sleep, read, socialize and learn from what is always around us. Maybe there is simply too much emphasis on why homework is bad natured and a waste of time and not enough on homework being a good thing, but in moderation. I don't think it is necessary for homework to be outlawed period. I think the most necessary thing is that a system is devised in which teachers can give homework on certain days of the week and only a certain amount on those days. I can clearly see the value of homework, however I also see the value of a child's free time and physical/ mental well being.

[10agreco]

Homework is an essential part of an education. It is necessary for teachers to give homework to enforce what they taught in their lesson; however, the amount of homework given to high school students is absurd. We are expected to come home from a nine hour school day and do another four hours of homework, study, participate in clubs and sports teams, keep our grades up, and excel in our majors. It is physically impossible to do all of this work and get the " healthy" eight hours of sleep necessary each night, especially with a long commute. With a lack of sleep teenagers go to school tired and fall asleep in their classes. This leads to a vicious cycle in which the student must spend more time at home learning the lesson because they fell asleep in class. Most teachers assign such a large amount of homework as "busy work" to put grades into the system. Students do not learn this way. Instead they either do their homework in a rush, writing random answers, or copying off of each other. The lack of sleep caused by so much homework leads to a lower immune system, and slower mental capacity. A study done recently has shown that the average homework load for a tenth grader does not increase or decrease his or her score on tests. The saddest part about this huge workloads is that most teachers do not even check or post answers to the homework. As a result, students do not even know if what they did is correct or incorrect. I can remember so many times when i spent hours meticulously doing an assignment, to have a teacher come to my desk, look at the homework number, and just put a check on my paper. I believe that teachers should spend just as much time grading assignments as the students spent doing them. At the end of the day most of us get around five hours of sleep do to so much homework.

The lack of sleep caused by so much homework results in many issues. High blood pressure, irregular heart beat, diabetes, and strokes just to name a few. A lack of sleep impairs the students ability to learn and memorize. It also results in lower lest grades, weight gain, and depression .Studies have found sleep deprivation to lead to a lower quality of life, and to stunt growth. The negative effects of so much homework are dangerous. A change in our education system should occur to benefit the well being of students

[3hsamori]

I think for some subjects homework is necessary like Math and Science because those are subjects where you need to practice problems in order to master them but for other subjects its not as necessary. Homework, I feel, is something that distracts you from what you really want to do in the future and takes away from you becoming a master at your future profession. For example if a student wanted to be a sports star, homework would take away from his practice time and force him to choose between school or the sport that he loves. I feel like sometimes when people give too much homework it doesn't give the student a chance to live his or her life to the fullest and the whole 4 years of high school is all homework and school without a social life. Sometimes when I have a large amount of homework and I have to stay up until 2 in the morning to complete it, I feel sick the next day and I can’t focus in school which can sometimes contribute to the downfall of my grades.

[6sjulia]

I understand why teachers give homework to students to complete at home, hence the name 'home'work, but I do not see why there is so much every night. Instead of applying themselves to after school activities or studying for an upcoming test, student's like myself are preoccupied with hours of homework to do. It is common for me to go to sleep after midnight or even later if there is an exceptionally large load in one night. Studies show that teenagers should sleep an average of 8 hours per night. I wake up at 5:30 every morning to get ready to school, make myself lunch and guarantee myself enough time to get to school with any unexpected delays. If I am up late doing my homework i then have a harder time to wake up the next morning not to mention the health risks I am causing to my own body, i get an average of 5 hours to sleep per night, which i definitely not enough for a growing 16 year old. Along with health ricks come the general risks in the outside world. Not getting enough sleep causes many people to drift off not only in class but on the way to and from school, which can be very unsafe as teens can get mugged and hurt when asleep on public transportation. In all I believe teachers should give less homework because homework is an important step in the learning process, but an excessive amount of homework will not benefit anyone

[analiessec]

I agree with all of your statements. We can definitely find the pros and cons of homework easily. I understand the value of homework. Its a fundamental part to our education, it allows us to further enforce any curriculum or new pieces of information. But I feel that there is a limited amount of benefits to homework. Obviously us being students we can find an infinite amount of reasons to why we don’t enjoy homework. But the issue is that teachers are taking our reasons as “complaints” and “excuses”. Some teachers aren’t acknowledging that our lives don't revolve completely around school. My main issue for homework is that teachers are assigning loads of homework per night to never fully check or notice your effort or merit. I’ve received homework in nearly all of my classes every night for teachers to just skim through it. I put so much of my time and effort each and every night just to receive a check or a smiley face stamp/ sticker on each of my assignments. Teachers don't realize that at a certain point students are just doing their homework to get it done. We are so focused on getting every assignment done we speed through each item and we aren't fully comprehending each document or each math problem. I’ve just realized that the quality of my homework can just constitute to me not doing it but some teachers don't even realize. If we notice that a teacher doesn't care, why should we put in effort. I understand that Teachers share our same struggles in having to create a lesson plan, and grade assignments for hundreds of students but I feel that if teachers assigned less homework and they’d actually read my work then it could benefit the both of us.

[3nkayla]

I do believe that homework is assigned for our own benefit to further increase our comprehension in order to achieve mastery in a subject, but when we are assigned hours of homework, it doesn’t always provide us with positive results.
In the first place, homework doesn’t usually counts as such a high percentage of our grade that we make sure we do it, and do it perfectly, but we just make sure it gets done, especially since most teachers just check for completion. Many students copy off their peers, or write a whole bunch of nonsense to get a good grade on homework. If we were to get homework that took us less than 30 minutes, this is the type of thing we would actually do ourselves and try hard on, because we are able to “see light at the end of the tunnel.” In addition, if we are learning about the same topic for 5 days in a row, a long homework really isn’t necessary, but we know that we have to do some practice at home in order to further drill our class work from that day into our minds, so that we are sure we are learning and understanding. However, when we receive hours of homework, not only is it useless after a certain point, but us, being the exhausted kids we are, get tired and that’s when we start to loose focus and stop trying so hard. Even once we do finish our long tedious homework, we are too tired to even complete other subjects, let alone have time for anything else we want to do. I completely agree that we could be spending time doing things more productive. Colleges like to see team sports, or community service, or any extracurricular activity, but how are we supposed to have time for these things in addition to our loads of homework each night? We simply don’t have all this time, which is why education and its rules are so contradicting of one another, and students are often left at some sort of loss, because of the amount of homework we receive.

[10pbeatrice]

Even though homework is believed to improve all the skills mentioned above I do believe that if you change one aspect of it, say for example the amount that is given, then it would make a major difference on how student perceive homework to be. Speaking from personal experience, it takes me practically two hours to get from school back home after 10th period that roughly ends at 4:09 pm and bring with me at least 5 hours of homework to finish by 10:30 pm in order to get a restful sleep which can prepare me for the same thing the next day as the cycle repeats. Not to mention that i have AP Chemistry homework which alone can take me more than 2 hours to finish I have spent copious amounts of time trying to finish every thing, if i'm lucky by 12 am, even if it means leaving some work for my free period. The statement about being literally sick of homework is true. I have been stressed out to the point where my immune system practically fails me by the time regents and finals happen that i had gotten pneumonia in freshman year and bronchitis in sophomore year and had to retake all of my regents in the summer.
Now, if the amount of homework was to be reduced i can finish on time, not spend time stressing over what happens if i don't hand in this homework on time risking my grades, get a good night's sleep, and not dread coming into school hoping i don't get too much homework.

[10pbeatrice]

Even though homework is believed to improve all the skills mentioned above I do believe that if you change one aspect of it, say for example the amount that is given, then it would make a major difference on how student perceive homework to be. Speaking from personal experience, it takes me practically two hours to get from school back home after 10th period that roughly ends at 4:09 pm and bring with me at least 5 hours of homework to finish by 10:30 pm in order to get a restful sleep which can prepare me for the same thing the next day as the cycle repeats. Not to mention that i have AP Chemistry homework which alone can take me more than 2 hours to finish I have spent copious amounts of time trying to finish every thing, if i'm lucky by 12 am, even if it means leaving some work for my free period. The statement about being literally sick of homework is true. I have been stressed out to the point where my immune system practically fails me by the time regents and finals happen that i had gotten pneumonia in freshman year and bronchitis in sophomore year and had to retake all of my regents in the summer.
Now, if the amount of homework was to be reduced i can finish on time, not spend time stressing over what happens if i don't hand in this homework on time risking my grades, get a good night's sleep, and not dread coming into school hoping i don't get too much homework.

[3diegol]

While I believe homework is a necessary part of our education, sometimes the amount of homework given to students can be overwhelming and rightfully labeled as “ridiculous”. Homework does in fact give us the chance to review what we learn in class, but if we as students did not completely comprehend the lesson that is taught, how are we expected to complete an assignment that may take hours to complete? Projects, essays, and the standard post-lesson homework aren’t things that are unfamiliar to a student. However, it is certainly not something we have all become accustomed to. It is a fact that homework is a very time consuming and sometimes tedious task and while the majority of the student population complains about it, nothing has really been done to change the implementation of homework on our education. The average high school student is constantly worrying about future college plans and being able to qualify for their dream college. Taking this into consideration, students try to add extracurricular activities, sports, and clubs onto their college resume. With the amount of activities that us high school students are expected to complete, the pressure and quantity of homework is an issue that should certainly be fixed.

[10channah]

Homework varies in intensity and necessity depending on the subject or the topic. I find myself sometimes having the homework where I listen to music and text at the same time as completing it, but there are other assignments that I have to sit and really take the time to understand what I have to do. There are many times as well that I do the homework and notice how much I really didn't understand what happened in the class period, and that I really do have to review what happened that day in class. I think homework should be given if the topic is a tricky one, and students seem to not understand it. Many time when homework is given on a topic that is very simple or has nothing to do with what we are learning in class at all, then I feel like it is busy work and it is very unnecessary. Majority of people complain about the amount of homework given, and I do agree that the amount is excessive. As part of us growing up, we should be able to make the decision for ourselves whether we have to go home and work on what was done in class because it confused us or if we feel comfortable with the topic without the extra work. Many of us have other activities going on after school, that getting home at eight o'clock and then having to sit and do homework is very stressful, and it seems there is never a break. At the same time, during the weekends when it is supposed to be a break, I find I have double or even triple the homework, with projects and essays and studying to do, that it does not seem like there is any break at all throughout the school year. Overall, I think the amount of homework should be reduced and the decision should be put more in the students hands whether they need the extra work or not.

[10tjustine]

While so many argue that homework is an essential part of the academic experience, I believe it should in fact be banned for a student to have a more successful school and home life. It is true that daily homework cannot only prevent so many from getting the proper exercise they need, but can also reduce the amount of sleep that a student receives. Recent studies have shown that a teenage student needs, on average, nine and a half hours of sleep. Difficulty in the regulation of mood, attention, academic performance, and creativity are all direct results that many others and I feel from lack of sleep due to excessive homework. An hour of exercise a day can also prevent stress and related diseases. As a young woman, I firmly believe in the importance of creativity, which is often stunted from too much homework. This is proven through the success of education systems that have put a stop to homework. For example, Finland’s education system allows for the use of funding to go toward qualified teachers who assign very little to no homework in order to increase student’s drive to learn in school and allow for creative minds to prosper. In the United States, homework can be a crucial factor in the overall average of a student. Success is also often determined through your economic class. The elite can afford tutors, books, and efficient internet service to complete homework and do better in school. Overall, homework is causing more harm than good and the abolishment of homework will allow for grades to be efficiently earned and students to explore their creative minds.

[6ckiara]

Homework has always been such a controversial topic. On one hand, it's a good way to practice and reiterate what we've learned in class. On the other hand, it's proven to be detrimental to our mental health and status as students in the long run, making it completely unnecessary and harmful. There are probably about 2 people in the world that like coming home after a long day of school to do another three to four hours of homework. Students should be excited to learn, but coming home to homework at the end of the day is the bane of our existence; homework is no more than a chore to us. Not to mention, in addition to the many possible distractions in this day and age, it's impossible to not procrastinate. The mindset most students have of "Do homework or fail" is not productive at all; we put ourselves on auto-pilot while doing homework. We also don't even learn anything, since we have Google right at our fingertips and are too lazy and unmotivated to actually benefit from the work.

Another thing to mention is that sometimes homework is a teacher's way of teaching her class. I once had a teacher that took almost two weeks to teach what others were teaching in one. When Regents were around the corner and we still had not finished learning the material, she started giving us homework to read from the textbook and do the examples that were based on the things she did not have the time to teach. Basically, we had tons of homework for her class every night just because she had taken her sweet time teaching us during the year, and now that we were two units behind everyone else, we had to teach ourselves at home, instead of in school where we're actually supposed to learn from her. Homework is supposed to be a reiteration of schoolwork, not the very first lesson on a subject that we learn.

Moreover, I think the biggest con of today's homework system/policy is the lack of sleep that it encourages. A teacher simply does not understand that the one hour of homework he assigns every night, while it may not seem like much to him, is also being combined with the 4+ other teachers that also give an hour of homework each. In theory, that should equal at least 5 hours of homework each night! Not to mention the projects we have to do and tests to study for. I can't even count the number of times I've caught myself falling asleep in class because I had gone to bed at 1am the night before, and I know from observation and from them complaining to me that many other students are on the same boat. As a result, I completely believe that while homework can be beneficial at times, the extent to which it is assigned, the motives behind its assignment, and its effects on students' mental and physical health all contribute to an overworked, stressed, and depressed student. How are we supposed to be the "children of the future" if we can't even stay awake enough to make it through high school? Therefore, as said by Samori earlier, I believe that the amount of homework we are given should be greatly reduced, and that the only classes that should give homework semi-regularly are the skill-based classes such as math and science, since their coursework has to be practiced and memorized. Hopefully the BOE realizes how much of a detriment homework is to students these days and soon helps to alleviate our suffering.