Most students throughout their time in school get a hefty amount of homework throughout the years. It depends on the school, but some students can spend hours on their homework.
Students should have limited to no homework outside of school to promote creativity and play outside of school.
School work is important for learning and enhancing students’ brains, but it’s also important to take a break from time to time. There are many negative effects on children’s mental and physical health when pushing too much work and material on them. Some of these negative effects are anxiety, sleep deprivation, exhaustion and headaches. All of these effects make students perform worse in school, just because of the over exhaustion of school work. According to Sunshine Learning, “Most experienced distress and/or lacked time to engage in important life tasks outside of school. The majority (72%) reported being often or always stressed over schoolwork …and many reported that they experienced physical symptoms due to stress (82% reported experiencing at least one physical symptom in the past month, with 44% of the sample experiencing three or more symptoms). Overall, students reported getting less sleep than the National Sleep Foundation’s (2000) recommended 8.5 to 9.25 hours per night for healthy adolescent development.” Not only are there negative effects on students’ physical and mental health, but it also impacts their creativity. Most younger students only have a specific amount of time to be a kid. When students are concerned about homework outside of school, they don’t have enough time to play and experience the things they should while still being young. Homework tends to make kids grow up faster than they need to.
Although some might argue that there isn’t enough time to learn in the classrooms and teachers need to give students school work outside of class, this is false. Students spend up to six hours in school, with constant learning besides lunch and recess for elementary school students. Most of every student’s day is taken up with school with little to no time to do anything outside of school, especially when high school students work and do sports as well. Every student has time to learn within the hours of school if the time is spent correctly.
There are multiple things that can change to help fix the amount of homework that students receive. Firstly, teachers need to stop assigning so much homework, especially when it’s not necessary. Also, more time in class needs to be spent on learning so teachers don’t feel the need to assign as much homework to catch up with their curriculum. Overall, there needs to be decisions made by teachers to stop assigning homework at least to see if the grades in their class increase.
School is so important to young children and teens to learn and experience new things. Although school is good for students, too much of anything good is overwhelming. Homework needs to be put to a stop for children’s mental and physical health, so children can keep being children as long as they can.
