The Harmful Effects of Homework

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The Harmful Effects of Homework

High school students feel more stress than working adults, and children are beginning to feel aversion towards learning. Both adolescents and children are at risk of health issues due to anxiety and less time is spent with family, playing, and sleeping. The cause for all of this is too much homework that is suffocating students. Homework causes students to sleep less, have more stress, and even forces students to give up extracurricular activities. These negative results can be improved by reducing the homework load.

Students continue to work late into the night to meet the pressing homework deadlines, sacrificing much needed sleep. According to the National Sleep Foundation, teens need 8.5 to 9.25 hours of sleep in order to do well in school, but they only get an average of 7 hours of sleep because of school work (Teens and Sleep). A cruel cycle exists between school work and sleep. Students are assigned a lot of homework and stay up late working on it. In class they use up time going over the homework, and cannot fit the lesson in the class period. To make matters worse they are given another large amount of homework in order to keep up with lessons and repeat the process. When students do not get the needed amount of sleep to be able to work in school they cannot pay attention in class and get behind in school. Dangers are very real when it comes to a lack of sleep such as student drivers getting to school in the morning. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, drowsy driving causes more than 100,000 crashes every year, and a leading factor to drowsy driving is not getting enough sleep (NHTSA). In high school, students can drive themselves to school, and if they are no...

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...g, and asking, “What is the lowest grade I can get to pass?” In fact, Finland, one of the leading countries in education, hardly ever assigns homework, unlike other countries, such as Thailand, who assign more homework and are behind(Suskind). Even if the teachers, in Finland, did assign homework it would only take thirty minutes to finish. Teachers can also benefit from less homework because it would reduce the amount of time grading.

Reduce the amount of homework students receive so that they can get the sleep they need to fully grow and develop. Changing the large mass of homework will help students not have an excessive amount of stress, and have more time to participate in extracurricular activities, which would provide other important benefits. A smaller burden will help students to be healthier, more productive, and be a more fully developed person.

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