High School Homework

After a long day of school, students are tired, stressed, and overworked. This is often something that is ignored when it comes to students of all ages. Homework provides a heavy load that can add additional stress and time on a student’s shoulders. Schools should be making sure that students are receiving enough work throughout the day, to make sure kids do not have the worry of homework when school is over. Students who receive lots of homework, may not have enough time in the evenings to be around family, friends and enjoy the rest of their day.

87% of high school students get less than the recommended 8-10 hours of sleep (Richter). Over the past few years, the amount of time students spend on homework has gone up , some up to 4 hours on it. While the recommended amount is still at 2. While taking away homework could be a possibility, students can still get benefits out of doing it. What many sleep experts recommend doing, is starting school later. Some of the advantages of later school starting times are that teens get more sleep, perform better academically, and are mentally healthier.

Starting this year, Decatur High School switched their block scheduling to an eight-period schedule. While this allows students to learn from each class every day, it also weighs them down with extra daily stress that would not come from the block schedule. Now that the school has eight class periods every single day, students have more homework and less time to do it. With only forty-five minutes per a class period, even teachers complain there is not enough time for them to meet their daily teaching criteria, resulting in more homework for the students and less time to learn the material for the homework. Being a teenager is already stressful, and, with the addition of school and extra curricular activities, it becomes a nuclear bomb of stress. Furthermore, it is recommended by doctors for students to get the standard “9 hours of sleep” at night, however, most students at Decatur High School would prove that teens regularly get only four to six hours of sleep and sometimes even less. The reason being, with after school activities which usually end around 8:00 PM, dinner, and maybe a shower, they’re starting on homework around 9:00 to 10:00 PM. Students who are in advanced courses may spend about 2-4 hours on homework, depending on the subject. That likely puts them to bed around midnight to 2:00 AM. When asking students who are taking advanced courses, most would agree that they have more homework this year, resulting in less sleep. With less sleep and more work,

With pushing back the time to 8;30 they will still have time to do there homework and do after school activities. A study was done on 25 students at two points in time, once in the spring of their 9th grade and once in autumn of their 10th grade. The students had their usual schedules for the school day and wore small activity monitors on their wrists, and kept diaries of the activities they have done during the day and sleep schedules for two consecutive weeks. The average amount of sleep on school nights that students go was from 6 hours to 7 hours 9 minutes (Backgrounder). Students are in school for 7 hours out of the day. Plus more with activities that they do like sports or maybe even theater. Most sports run practices for 3 hours, most being right after school. There are some sports that do not get a space until later at night because other sports are using them. which can push a practice back to 6-9 and by the time the students get home it can be 9:30 at night which in order to get enough sleep when getting up at 5:30 in the morning they need to go to sleep at 9-10 O’clock to get enough sleep. Usually when having homework teenagers are staying up past 11 p.m. in order to get it all done for the next day. That then causes a chain reaction because it is happening almost every night of the

Another part of the problem with high schools is the amount of homework is given to students. Let’s say that a student has five classes a day and receives five hours of homework each night. That leaves the student little to no time to spend time with family and friends, go to work, play a sport, and even

Homework in general can be difficult for a student, but when they get multiple assignments from more than one class, it can be overwhelming. Homework alone can take hours on end to finish without adding after school activities like sports or business at home. Studying for exams can be even more stressful and may take even longer than doing homework, making late nights even later. Students have to study in order to get good grades, but cutting their sleep short will not benefit them.

A typical eight-period school day would have eight forty-seven minute long classes with a thirty minute lunch and five minutes between each class period, lasting the whole school year (7). A typical four-period school day would have four ninety-two minute long classes with a thirty minute lunch and seven minutes between each class period (7). The first four classes go from the middle of August to around the middle of January, then the next four go from the middle of January to the end of May.

The quality of students’ homework is much more important than the quantity of students homework and data collected during recent studies has proven that homework is not making the grade. “. . . American students are entangled in the middle of international academic rankings: 17th in reading, 23rd in science, and 31st in math according to the most recent results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA)” (Murphy-Paul). Students should not be given an excessive amount of homework because the pressure of having to complete excessive amounts of homework every night is quite daunting for most students. Knowing how much homework is the right amount correlates with age and grade. An 8th grade student should not be given a myriad of homework that would keep her awake past midnight completing assignments. In any case, there should be a limit on the amount of homework all teachers give to students because an excessive amount of homework would eventually cause students to become uninterested in school and learning, which could result in poor test scores and low ranks in international academic rankings. In order for students to carry out daily activities throughout the day restfully, teachers must be able to provide homework that does not exceed the appropriate amount of time needed to complete it, which is based on grade level. If teachers are too clueless of a students health due to excessive amounts of homework, many students will develop cases of sleep

Many students stay up very late every night finishing homework procrastinating to do it and go to bed at a un-reasonable time and losing many hours of sleep because of their homework load daily. Many studies show that certain subjects usually have this impact on students specifically mathematics. As you get into your junior and senior year of high school many students blame homework for lack of sleep. Seniors and juniors have higher expectations than freshman and sophomores. They are closer to going to college and that fact stresses practically every student by a large margin. Most students on a regular school night spend up to 2-4 hours a night doing homework. Many surveys say that most senior students get less than 7 hours of sleep every day on average. This may be for any person in any grade, but this survey was based on senior high school students.

Even a professor by the name of Harris Cooper at the Duke University found connections between students and spending time on homework. Firstly, he found that elementary school students improve study habits with only a small amount of homework. Secondly, middle school students are willing to do homework within ninety minutes each night, and thirdly, high school students are willing to do homework within ninety minutes and two and a half hours. Anything after those times, they start to think of it as busy work and lose the interest in learning (DeNisco).

However, the majority of families have two parents that work full time and if they are having to come home and help their younger ones with work that should only be done during school hours, then it is more stress added onto their day. The time it takes for a parent to have their child to do homework could range anywhere from one to two hours. The problem with that is that families tend to be on a set schedule after school and work. When they are set to a schedule some things tend to get cut like playing outside, family bonding time, and in some cases it could cause the child to get to bed at a later time. Lack of sleep not only effects the child, but it also pays a toll on the parents. Therefore, homework not only has a bad outcome on the students but their relationship with their parents and home

Grades six through eight have roughly 3.2 hours of homework per night, if a student gets out of school until four and has sports practice until 5:30 and has three hours of homework, they would be finished with everything at 8:30, they still have time to take a shower and eat dinner with family.

Surprisingly, too much homework a night can result in stress. According to “Homework can have an Impact on Kids Health,” more than 30 minutes a night can cause children and teens to become more stressful the next day. In addition to so much homework, parents get stressed with their kids having afterschool sports and afterschool activities knowing they have homework to do. For this

In 1984, a survey was conducted that reported twenty-five percent of seventeen year olds did less than an hour of homework each night. A decade later, a report from the National Center for Education Statistics, reviewing trends in data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, found thirty-nine percent of seventeen year olds said they at least one hour of homework each day. Moving into the twenty-first century, the amount of homework has increased significantly. In 2011, a survey of 1,000 kindergarten through twelfth grade teachers found high school teachers on average assign about three and a half hours of homework each week. For high school students who typically have five classes with different teachers, that could mean as much as seventeen and a half hours each week.

The survey of 1,000 K-12 teachers found that on average, they assign 3.5 hours of homework each week. For high school students who typically have seven classes with different teachers, that’s approximately 24.5 hours each week. Students spend approximately 35 hours a week at school and around 25 hours on homework. This lengthens each school day from around 7 hours to 10 hours. Now add the time students spend on extracurricular activities and sleep. They are faced with such packed schedules, and yet we wonder why they are struggling. Homework consumes an excessive amount of their time, and if we banned it, their schedules would be far more tolerable. The questionability of homework causes it to be one of the most