Overdue assignment: Cancel all homework
Picture this, you’re an 11 year old student. You’re walking home from school after a tiring day of socializing with friends and doing very diligent, hard work in the classroom. As you are packing up your bag, excited to go home and relax over the long weekend with your family, the teacher calls everyone’s attention. They write up on the board six homework assignments all due the day you return to school. Immediately your perfect long weekend has been crushed and destroyed by these taunting assignments. The bell rings and you leave the building with the looming assignments hanging over your head. This is very typical for an 11 year old student in middle school. The debate for giving out homework has gone on for far too long, with the negatives outweighing the positives. Educators need to start fitting in all the schoolwork into the allotted class periods. Teachers often assign more than one assignment per class and all of those quickly add up, causing harmful impacts on young students. Homework should not be assigned to students because it is unbeneficial and causes students too much added stress, as well as taking up family time.
Homework needs to be abolished for many reasons. One of those is that it takes up time that could be used for family bonding and socializing. After school hours, most kids look forward to hanging out with friends and spending time with family. Whether it be watching a movie, going for a family hike, or getting ice cream with friends, homework puts a wrench in all of those opportunities. After school is time for the students to do whatever they please after being under a teacher’s watch all day. They should not be forced to do more school work outside of school. “By taking away precious family time and putting kids under unneeded pressure, is an ineffective way to help children become better learners and thinkers” (Greatschools.Org). This exemplifies how giving homework and not letting the students socialize as well as spend time with others is worthless. The excess of homework does more harm than good when it comes to letting kids be kids. The product of this is a stressed, overworked and tired student.
However, even with all the evidence, many parents and guardians believe that students are being benefited with the extra practice students are getting outside of the classroom. They believe it gives the students time to apply what they learned in the classroom and master the skill. Although it is giving kids practice, they are not benefitting from it. The child completing the homework is often not thinking of how to do the work, or invested in the task at hand. Instead they are thinking about when they will be done with the pointless assignment. Studies have been conducted to show homework has no proven benefits. “Studies have long shown that there is no academic benefit to high school homework that consumes more than a modest number of hours each week. In a study of high schoolers conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), researchers concluded that ‘after around four hours of homework per week, the additional time invested in homework has a negligible impact on performance’” (Times). This clearly states that when students are given excess and unnecessary homework there is no positive impact. The outcome is wasting a student’s time when they could be outside being active or socializing instead of being cooped up in their room.
In addition, not only does it not benefit the upper grade students, but the lower grades are also not positively impacted by homework. The Washington Post states “First, no research has ever found a benefit to assigning homework (of any kind or in any amount) in elementary school. In fact, there isn’t even a positive correlation between, on the one hand, having younger children do some homework (vs. none), or more (vs. less), and, on the other hand, any measure of achievement. If we’re making 12-year-olds, much less five-year-olds, do homework, it’s either because we’re misinformed about what the evidence says or because we think kids ought to have to do homework despite what the evidence says” (Washington Post). This passage reveals that no matter how or when you start homework, it will not impact a child’s performance inside the classroom. It wastes a student’s time outside of class and causes unnecessary issues. As a result, the student is less happy outside of school and often cannot get school off their mind to relax.
So, what’s the best way to stop the tireless stress about homework? Stop giving it. Homework has been proven unbeneficial by countless sources, it is not helping the student in any way shape or form. Homework is forced work and should not be mandatory by any means. Teachers need to put a halt to homework once and for all. Students will still be educated in school, and if there is a test? Sure, study. Want to refresh your memory? Look over some classwork on your own time. But the mountain of nightly assignments have to subdue for good. Homework has caused all students enough misery to last them a lifetime, and there needs to be an end now.
All in all, homework causes undesirable stress and inhibits students from enjoying life outside of school with friends and family. It needs to be stopped, for the sake of the poor students. Countless experiments have shown that classmates and their peers have had nothing good come out from countless hours of homework. Students should be allowed to review or go over what they need on their own time, not some useless worksheet the teacher forces to be mandatory. To conclude, homework needs to be turned in for good.
Resources:
https://www.greatschools.org/gk/articles/what-research-says-about-homework/
https://time.com/4740297/homework-should-be-banned-from-schools/
