Waking Up Too Much Homework

Every night, students come home from school with an overwhelming amount of homework. Not only is it stressful, it devours a good amount of free time. On top of that, after staying up late studying and writing essays, we have to wake up extremely early. It’s exhausting and by the time the weekend rolls around we’re relieved. These details like waking up too early or getting too much homework determines how we are as a student and our future. Here at P.C.C.S. we do exactly this; we stay up working on homework and then we wake up sometimes as early as 5 a.m. It’s a huge step in the wrong direction.

To start off, too much homework can be a huge time consuming monster. With what some students do after school, there simply isn’t enough time to

do homework and get enough sleep. “For high schoolers, two hours appears optimal. As with middle-schoolers, give teens more than two hours a night and academic success flatlines” (Crawford, “Does homework really work?”). After a certain amount of homework, students don’t want to try anymore and resort to other ways to get it done. Reducing amounts of homework will prevent finding ways around doing homework while also allowing us to absorb what the homework is actually trying to teach. It’s absolutely miserable for A.P. and honors students because some have to make sure that every single detail is perfect while also doing a huge amount of homework. “This kind of busy work, by its very nature, discourages learning and instead promotes doing homework simply to get points,” (Parker, “Stanford research shows pitfalls of homework”). When you have more than 2 hours of homework, it completely defeats the purpose of it being there in the first place. You might as well just get rid of homework entirely, which is preferable. If we’re going to keep homework we need to reduce it to 2 hours at most. Not only is it a waste of time for students, it’s a waste of time for teachers and a huge waste of paper.