Homework Is Bad Essay

1092 Words3 Pages

One of the biggest staples of the educational community, as well as the biggest fear of any high school student, is the assignment of homework for students to complete. Homework has become such a central part of our educational society that kindergarten students at the age of four and five are being assigned homework by their teachers. Everyone who has ever experienced the American educational system is more than familiar with homework, and just how annoying it can be. Asking just about any student if the homework given to them helps them learn will result in the answer, no. I do not believe that to be the case however. I think there is an underlying problem in the idea of homework, and that it starts in the classroom. Often times, and I can …show more content…

This is because as a student myself, the majority of homework I have been assigned in the past falls into the category of “busy work” which not only wastes my time doing repetitive actions, but it also does not help teach me anything new. There have been many times in which I have decided that homework is not even worth doing for a certain class, because it will be too hard, and the teacher has no plan to even check it. In many classes homework ends up feeling like something the teacher is assigning just for the sake of assigning something. This choice to not complete homework is also fueled by a complete and utter lack of any free time to do all my homework. Being a high school student is a full time job. We have to go to school for 8 hours every day, many students are involved in after school activities such as sports or club activities, as well as church activities in the evenings. Many high schoolers are also encouraged by parents to go out and do things with friends to have fun, which is very hard to do when you have 3 hours of homework sitting at home. Homework is something that many students find extremely stressful. This is not because it is necessarily a hard assignment, but because it serves no purpose except to waste our …show more content…

From my perspective however, this design is simply a fairy tale. For example, in just about every math class I have ever taken assigned homework fairly consistently. It is usually 20 question to answer from a chapter. Now this may seem like it obviously does not support my argument, in that you would say that math problem do help me review, and I can agree with that completely. What I disagree with however is the need to do 20 problems utilizing the same tools, over and over. Wendy Ponte, a writer for Motherhood magazine, writes that there have been several studies to try and prove this relationship between school work and the quantity of homework. What was found is that what mattered about the homework was not the amount given, but the content of the homework. She explains that for a student to fully grasp concepts in subjects such as math, a student only needs to complete approximately five problems to understand how to appropriately use a concept, and that the same applies to subjects such as english and history. This means instead of needing 20 problems in math, I should only need 5 for every concept I learn in class. The difference between 5 problems and 20 problems is a difference of almost 30 minutes to an hour. This would not only help to encourage students to complete homework, but would help ensure that they maintain a desire to

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