Homework: Helpful or Harmful?

Author's Note- This is a piece I wrote for my District Writing Assessment on the harmful affects of homework, and why students shouldn't be given so much of it.

To most students, homework is a part of everyday life.  I know it is for me.  Most students have anywhere between 30 minutes to two hours of it almost every night, especially once they reach middle school and high school.  I want to introduce some points about homework I've found through some research I did and my own personal opinion on it so you can see that although homework has its positives, too much homework is harmful, and can affect our education in a negative way, instead of helping students.

Something that really aggravates me is that even though there are many negative effects of homework that are well known, such as frustration and exhaustion, eyestrain, insomnia, and even loss of desire to learn, many schools and teachers still assign boatloads of worksheets, essays, projects, and fact sheets without giving us time at school to get it done.  Now, I know most of the teachers at ACMS don't do that, but some do, and many more around the country.  So by assigning tons of homework with little work time when they know the affects of it, teachers are setting their pupils up for all of the aforementioned effects, and leading them to failure.

Another thing that bothers me is the lack of free time homework gives me for relaxation, extracurricular activities, and just going outside and shooting hoops or kicking around my soccer ball.  I get home, usually grab a snack, and head up to my room in my little corner to work on my homework.  I'll start doing my homework, but I'll get about halfway through it and then I have to go to my babysitting job, or my soccer practice.  Soccer practice takes up about 3 hours and 15 minutes of my day because its so far away, and when I get home, I have to eat dinner and shower.  By the time I'm done with that, it's late, and I'm still only halfway done with my assignments.  On those days, which is almost every day, I get really stressed out, stay up late doing homework, and don't get enough sleep.  I know that's how a lot of other student's afternoons are, as well.  I honestly don't think I've been outside to just play around and get active on my own time since school started. 

Something else I'd like to point out is that I've heard so many different people talking about how overweight Americans are getting.  I personally think homework is one of the causes of obesity.  When all we have time to do is homework, there's no time to go out and get active and play.  Also, many people eat when they're upset.  To many students, homework is upsetting!  It confuses them and frustrates them, gives them headaches and fatigue.  Many people would turn to comfort food when it gets that stressful.

One of the main things I can't stand about homework is when we get meaningless assignments, though.  It's one of my pet peeves, actually.  How exactly does coloring a worksheet improve my education?  What does cutting up magazines and gluing pictures on a piece of paper have to do with science class?  When I do this fact sheet, am I really thinking about the definition of a peninsula, or mindlessly following directions?  Seriously, what's the point of doing worksheet after worksheet when there's no real content in them, or opportunity to think for myself? 

Another issue with the amount of homework students get is that when they are given more homework than they can handle in the given amount of time, whether it be a class period, a day, or even a week, they rush through their assignments.  They'll just try to finish it as fast as they can so they can move on to the next paper due, or textbook assignment that needs to be finished.  I know this not only from my friends, but from my own experiences.  I have to speed through my science homework, not giving quality answers, just the fastest one I can think of off the top of my head.  Then I'll start my math homework and if I get a weird decimal answer, then all I can say is oh, well, not enough time to fix it, I'll figure it out tomorrow.

Homework can, in some situations, be a show of teacher incompetence as well.  If we just spent a whole hour and ten minutes focusing on a lesson, then the teacher decides to give us homework, it could be their way of saying that they didn't think we understood the lesson or learned it enough, so here's extra practice that we have to finish and turn in.  And if we spend eight hours a day at school already, we shouldn't have to spend another two relearning what we already learned.

Teens need good night's rest as well.  Many people blame the fact that we're so tired on Facebook or texting.  I don't have a Facebook, and I never text past 9PM, and I'm still bone-tired every morning.  It's not from Facebook.  Usually it's from homework that I stayed up until 10:30PM doing.

In my research, I learned something that shocked me at first, but later I realized that it's not all that surprising.  This is an excerpt from a book written by specialists about the negative effects of homework:

"…most parents (as well as many teachers) would be surprised to learn that there's very little proof that homework helps elementary school pupils learn more or have greater academic success.  In fact, as this book will explain, when children are asked to do too much nightly work, just the opposite is found.  And study after study shows that homework is not much more beneficial in middle school, either."

-The Case Against Homework: How Homework is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It by Sarah Bennett and Nancy Kalish

Once I thought about it, I realized that in many cases, whenever I did my homework, I never learned anything, just repeated what I was already taught.  That's not really helping me in academic success.  Most homework doesn't help me at all, in fact.

Homework also interferes with family bonding time.  Families all around the country are complaining about how they never get to spend time with their kids, because whenever they aren't working, their kids are holed up in their room studying.  Some people may argue that when parents help with homework, they are bonding by getting involved in their child's education.  In truth, when parents try to help with homework, often times the way they were taught is completely different than what the student was taught, and everyone ends up to confused and frustrated.

Homework not only has negative effects on students and parents, but the environment as well.  We waste more and more energy with every light bulb we have to keep burning and laptop we charge.  We have to chop down our trees for textbooks, pencils, and paper.  We are killing our earth one worksheet at a time. 

All the assignments we've had to do are hard on the students, parents, and environment.  We shouldn't have to go through this on a daily basis.  Homework can be good in moderation, when it's homework that has some real, actual content, but when we are given a ton of worksheets where there's no thought process involved, it just wastes our time.  I hope now you can see that the cons of homework in most cases outweigh the pros, and that homework can be very harmful if we're given too much.