Homework should be cut down for students

It’s a Sunday morning and you wake up and have some breakfast. You decide to make some plans to hang out with your friends later. It’s gonna be a good day. But then you remember how much homework your teachers assigned you, and you get stressed out because you have a test coming up and you don’t want to fail. Homework can be one of the leading causes of stress for students across the country, and some teachers just don’t get the hint. Although homework can help students retain knowledge, teachers should cut down on homework because it’s harmful for students’ mental health, it doesn’t help their grades, and some students don’t have time to do a lot of it.

Firstly, homework can negatively affect a student’s mental health. Homework is the leading cause of stress in America for teenagers and it doesn’t just affect mental health, it can affect physical health too: “According to a study by Stanford University, 56 percent of students considered homework a primary source of stress. Too much homework can result in lack of sleep, headaches, exhaustion and weight loss. Excessive homework can also result in poor eating habits, with families choosing fast food as a faster alternative” (Oxford Learning). This illuminates the fact that most students say homework causes them the most stress, and it can cause them to have unhealthy eating habits which isn’t good in the long term. These problems also may cause students to not pay attention in school the next day because of how tired they might be. In summary, homework can affect both mental and physical health for students which can cause them to pay less attention in school and therefore get bad grades.

Secondly, homework isn’t beneficial for students, and it doesn’t represent their work well. After school, a lot of students get homework to do to retain the work they did in class. Stated by Healthline, some teachers go on the guideline of 10 minutes of homework for each grade level and “The data shows that homework over this level is not only not beneficial to children’s grades…” (Healthline). This proves that homework when given in bulk is not beneficial and it doesn’t help students learn. All it will do is stress them out and bring their grade down. To sum it up, when students get too much homework, they can get stressed out and it won’t help them.

Finally, a lot of students don’t have enough free time to do homework. Although, some students who do sports and afterschool activities just don’t have the time to do a lot of homework, and there are a lot of them that don’t. According to the US Census more than 50% of children take part in a least one after school activity, some even more (census.gov). This illustrates that there are a lot of students who take part in after school activities and won’t have the time to do a lot of homework. In total, there are many solutions on how to cut back on homework but certain homework days and simply cutting down on homework are most likely the easiest and the best.

To sum it all up, teachers need to cut down on homework. Doing this would help students relieve stress, help them retain more knowledge and get better grades, and it would allow students to do more after school activities. Solutions can be simply cutting down on the amount of homework teachers give. For example, if there is a day where a teacher assigns an easy lesson, they shouldn’t give homework, it would be pointless. This could work for some of the elementary students, but as students get older, lessons will get harder so it would be hard to do it in middle school or high school. Another solution would be to have certain days where teachers give homework for certain classes. For example, Monday and Friday could be math and language arts days, Tuesday and Wednesday could be language and history days and so on. On the days where teachers don’t give homework, they could do reviews on past topics of the chapters so they won’t forget anything. This could also help them prepare for midterms or finals later in the year. Teachers always tell students to stay active and have fun in their teenage years, but how can they do this with the amount of homework they are getting?