Images of children and teenagers sitting at the kitchen table with books surrounding them, or sitting at desks secluded in their room, for hours on end, dutifully studying for the next day’s exam has been around for quite some time. But recent studies have shown that just because a child is doing homework, does not mean he or she is learning (Kohn). The fact is, the homework teachers have assigned has gone up dramatically. In 1981, children ages six to nine received about 44 minutes of homework a week. By 1997, children six to nine were receiving almost two hours of homework a week (Chaika) That number has almost tripled. Though supporters have pointed out the many benefits of homework over the years, which may have led to the increase of …show more content…
Should a student start his or her homework as soon as he or she gets home from school at about three, that means homework should be done around seven at night. But, if the student participates in extra curricular activities, homework might be pushed back to being finished at around eight or nine. Plus, people need to eat. Even if it is heating up a TV dinner, that is still about another half hour that homework is being pushed back to being done at. So now, homework is being completed around 8:30 to 9:30. And of course, what high school student does not hang out with friends or socialize or just plain relax every night. If a student is socializing or relaxing to maintain a healthy lifestyle, by spending an hour or two doing these things, he or she is now falling asleep after an exhausting day anywhere from 9:30, which is not a bad time to midnight. And as growing human beings, should be getting at least eight hours of sleep each night which is not going to happen if students are going to bed at midnight and waking up at 6:30 the next morning to start the process over again. But, supporters may argue that this teaches time management skills (Oak). All of what was previously mentioned does not in fact teach time management skills, it teaches students to prioritize. Which can be a good skill to know, but may not be good for grades. Say a teacher assigns the before mentioned half hour of homework. A
Assuming by the time teenagers start high school they will have around three hours of homework each night. Most high schoolers will not start their homework right as they get home, they will take a much-needed break and relax for a few hours, meaning they would not start their homework until 8:00PM. The homework is not very easy, forcing them to spend even longer on their homework and they are awake until midnight trying to figure out how to calculate the mass of Saturn.For instance, during the school week most students would be going to bed at 11:32 PM and wake up at 7:20 allowing them to get 7 hours and 48 minutes opposed to weekends where they would fall asleep at 12:56 and wake up at 10:36 getting 9 hours a 40 minutes of needed sleep (Wahlstrom). The amount of sleep they are getting on the weekdays is not sufficient to promote healthy growth. It is important for everyone to get at least 8 hours of sleep each night to be able to function properly. With a lack of sleep comes a risk of medical
The debate regarding exactly how much homework is too much homework has been an ongoing debate for years. As of right now, there seems to be no end in sight for this debate. Various adults believe that if children do not obtain homework, then they are not learning properly. However, numerous children are obtaining a substantial amount of homework per night, as well as per each class. Once a child exceeds a certain amount of homework, then it is no longer beneficial for the child’s education. An excessive amount of homework can essentially become harmful to the child’s education. As a result, teachers are struggling with finding the right amount of homework to assign to students. The National Education Association as well as the National Parent-Teacher Association endorse the “10-minute rule” for teachers to follow when assigning homework to students. If a child is assigned an excessive amount of homework, then the child might experience more harm than good when attempting to complete the assigned homework.
Before everyone rushes off to condemn homework altogether, they should realize the many benefits provided when students take work home. Many times, repetition has been proven as “the law of learning.” When students do work outside of school, it helps reinforce what they learn inside school. According to Wendy J. Ponte, a freelance writer with three school-aged children, there are “no studies to back up the claim” that repetition improves academic performance. While some repetition might be helpful, Ponte points out that “When kids come home with 100 multiplication problems to solve, it becomes simple drudgery.” Can a love of learning be fostered in children who are overcome with hordes of homework?
Research shows that teens sleep cycles are naturally delayed (Should High School Start Later, 2013). About fifteen percent of high schools start at 8:30am or later and, forty percent of schools start earlier than 8:00 am (SiOWfa, 2014). The start times of schools are reducing the amount of sleep a student is receiving on school nights. Most teens start their day at 5:30-6:30 am to prepare for school, but if their natural bedtime is 11 pm or even midnight, they are getting only 6-7 hours of sleep! Remember that teens need at least 8 hours to function properly. To fix this issue schools will have to start later.
Carrion, Elder Homework as a lifestyle Education has been adding new methods in order to give students the opportunity to be capable of becoming successful individuals in society. On the other side, the quantity and frequency of homework assigned may generate discrepancies in how kids are organazing their time after a prolonged journey in classes. Also, the relevance of homework impacts the process of learning and the formation of kids’behaviors. As Alfie Kohn points out in “Kids May Be Right After All: Homework Stinks,” the period of time that homework takes is indirectly creating a gap in certain areas; kids spending more time with their family, having less fulfilling lives, as well as, being kids.
Once these students do everything they need to do for the day it usually is around ten thirty at night and by going to bed that late and then waking up so early they only receive around seven hours a sleep a night. Even though extracurricular activities may get in the way of scheduling, one should support later school start times because teens would not be sleep deprived, melatonin levels can balance, and teens will have higher concentration levels throughout the day.
Should students have to choose between sleep deprivation and academics? How many hours of sleep does an average student need? How is the average student supposed to participate in sports, have quality family time, have an after school job and do homework and be in bed by 9:00 p.m. High School students should have later starting times in order to have a balanced life and 9 hours of undisturbed sleep every day of the week. Three key factor why a later start time is important is because of health issues, and after school activities.
In my opinion, schools do not give students enough time to do their homework, go to after school clubs or activities, and play a sport. High Schoolers barely have any time to just hang out with each other during the week, go to their school activities, and get all of their homework done. Because their school activities and homework takes up a lot of time, it makes students stay up past the time that they should be going to bed. So even when students try to go to bed early, they are kept
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.
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
There is much more evidence that suggests that high schools should not start before 8 a.m. For example, the biological sleep patterns of adolescence shift toward later times for both sleeping and waking. Therefore, It is not natural for teens to be going to bed before 11 p.m. on school nights. In addition, teens need about eight to ten hours of sleep each night to function best, and only 15% of teens get 8.5 hours of sleep on school nights. Also, teens tend to have very irregular sleep patterns across the week. They will go to bed much later and sleep in much later on the weekends. This is due to the fact that when teens go through puberty their melatonin levels increase later at night and decrease later in the morning.
Homework has been an area of discussion for teachers, students, and even psychologists. It’s been a practice which has been used throughout the United States to help students learn material, reinforce their day’s lesson, or just as busy work to improve a student’s work ethic. Several people view homework as useless, or just plainly unhelpful; this view has been demonstrated ever since the early twentieth century, where many authors and politicians were vehemently against homework, going as far as to write whole books and draft legislation (legislation which had passed the Californian government and had been law) against homework. This opposition has ever since faded, but is now seeing a new movement around America, and there are reasons as to why that is. In an article from CNN, they quote a study from another article published by The American Journal of Family Therapy which states that: “students in the early elementary school years are getting significantly more homework than is recommended by education leaders, in some cases nearly three times as much homework as is recommended”, and, as such, students are raised within a state of stress from the first grade. Several other studies also find that homework is very hurtful; the Journal of Experimental Education published an article which had made a study that found that the average amount of time students spend on homework each night had been 3.1 hours from a sample of high-performing schools in California, when the recommended time on homework is, at most, one hour each night. Homework has been mandated work for students all around the country, and several others, and the workload seems to only be increasing, and so, how might this workload affect a student’s ability to live a healthy life, a teacher’s work plan, and a psychologist’s view of an enormous workload on a student?
The debate that is currently happening throughout America is whether children should or should not be forced to have homework, a standard part of education that has been in existence since at least early 1900’s. Homework began generations ago, and “has generally been viewed as a positive practice and accepted without question as part of the student routine;” however, “over the years, homework in U.S. schools has evolved from the once simple tasks of memorizing math facts or writing spelling words to complex projects” (Vatterott). Not only recently but even at the end of the 19th century was homework getting in the way of family life. Children normally always have house roles that they are expected to complete and around the 19th century “many families could not afford to have their children continue schooling, given the requisite two to three hours of homework each night” (Vatterott). Not just in current situations, but also the 19th and 20th centuries, the children play as helpers and workers in the
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
High schoolers’ late nights can result in lack of sleep which could be the potential problem in their school performance and grade point average. Different problems teens face can affect their sleep patterns which can make them sleepy throughout the day. At certain ages, people need a specific amount of sleep to be fully functionable. Schools should begin the school hours later to increase students’ academic level and focus throughout the day.