Homework Squanders Student Lives

As students, we can all agree that homework takes up a majority of our time outside of school. Balancing sports, socializing, and extracurriculars with schoolwork is not an easy feat, often inducing stress and anxiety that can negatively affect our day-to-day lives.

When taking advanced, honors, or Advanced Placement (AP) classes, you are signing up for an added amount of tests, work, and academic challenge. Teachers seldom take into account the other difficult classes their students are taking, leaving them with an impossible culmination of work to do per night and on weekends.

Sophomore Carrie Zhang shared her experience with this hardship: “Some weeks I have a lot of work to do and it’s overwhelming because teachers will assign huge projects on the same day, which causes me to stay up really late.” Zhang currently is taking 2 AP classes and 1 honors class.

Despite the excessive amount of work students are assigned, AP teachers share a consistent opinion that they do not assign too much homework for their students involved in other hard classes. AP European History teacher Paul Verbansky said, “Honestly, I do not believe I give too much homework. The amount in the end [of a unit] is a lot, however, it is always chunked into smaller parts throughout the weeks. So, if students procrastinate, it is going to be stressful, but if you do a little bit at a time it is manageable.”

I do believe that if you manage your time well in and out of class, homework is not something that should weigh down your day. However, students in this day and age tend to struggle with time management, especially if they are involved in other activities outside of school. Because of this, balancing work with other things they might want to do more is wearying.

Senior Megan Mitchell said, “Over the weekend I am pretty much just catching up on all the stuff that I couldn’t do during the week, which sometimes affects my extracurricular activities.” Mitchell portrays the struggle that many students face when juggling school and interests they have outside of school; it is hard to prioritize 1 over the other, but sometimes it’s necessary in order to get everything done in a timely manner.

Students generally stay up late doing homework to get it done in time without thinking about the negative consequences that will become evident the following day. I personally stay up way later than I should in order to finish everything I need and study enough to maintain a high grade point average. This can cause me to be even more tired, and therefore stressed, at school, which causes me to have more homework, repeating the detrimental cycle over again.

Zhang said, “I stay up past midnight almost every night in order to get my homework done. Before a test sometimes it’s even later because there is just a lot to do.”

Homework affects students’ lives in more ways than teachers can imagine. It can cause sleep deprivation, stress and anxiety, lack of involvement in extracurricular activities, and is generally detrimental to the overall wellbeing of the student body. Teachers often have a hard time grasping how much their homework affects their students, as they think that it is manageable. However, in accumulation with all of their student’s other work, the burden is too much to bear.