Too Much Homework: Why You Are Back In The Eighth Grade

Did you know that the average high school student in today’s society has the same levels of anxiety as a psychiatric patient in the 1950s? According to psychologist Robert Leahy, school these days can get a little tough– especially when most students’ first response to a heavy backpack full of homework is to worry over whether or not it can be done. In the past decade, Leahy and other psychologists have noticed a steady nationwide increase in the amount of stress caused by schoolwork among high school students (Slate Magazine). What does this mean for tomorrow’s leaders and future generations of dignitaries? Scientists have concluded that sleep deprivation, long-term health problems, and declining overall academic achievement are

I have always played the same three sports in elementary school, baseball, soccer and basketball but the summer before 7th grade I wanted the try something new and play football but because I didn't know much about it I was having a hard time deciding if I was going to play or not. But When football season came around i signed up.

But we simply do not have enough time in the day. Some students don’t get home to almost seven after sports are done, some have jobs and don’t get home until seven o’clock… Before we know it, its eight o’clock and we still have three hours of homework to do. Going to sleep at eleven and waking up at six is not enough sleep for students. Because of all the work we receive in school, we need more time to sleep and make sure our mind set is in the right place. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, if you don’t get enough sleep your brain will not absorb information you learn.

Sometimes our parents have no time to help us because they have their jobs. Then if we can’t get any help it’s going to be either a late grade or an F because we can’t get a good grade without a complete assignment. Our parents could also have a goodnight sleep without having to worry about us failing their classes because of homework. Teachers will also gain out of no homework because they don’t have to deal with grading messy handwriting and awful grammar. They don’t have to stay up however long it takes just to grade all the papers their students. It’s especially hard for middle school teachers and up because there are so many kids and so many different classes. Teachers can go anywhere they want if their lesson plan is finished for the next day if there is no homework. They won’t have to deal with angry kids, teens and yelling at them if they’re failing school because of homework. Homework is keeping everyone up.

Along with homework being too repetitive, it can also be damaging to our physical and mental health. Fow example, sleep. So many students, not only in my school, are losing a lot of sleep due to all of the homework, as I said before, that they have to complete after arriving home. For me, after getting home from a sporting event at midnight, showering, doing chores, probably eating, doing my homework, and preparing for the next day of school, it is usually sometime around 3 o’clock at night before I actually crawl into bed. That’s ridiculous! A Lot like my elders (teacher, parents, grandparents etc.) are always nagging about us staying up all night scrolling on Instagram or Twitter and watching Youtube, I think they should also be doing something about the insane amounts of homework that we have keeping us up all night. My parents don’t let me have my phone in my room at night because they think/know that I will be up all night playing on it, but

The primary reason for attending school is for adolescents to get an education in hopes of getting a good job.  Attendance, test scores, and GPA’s all play an important role in a student’s success in school, and if they can all be improved by pushing the start time back, then this issue should be pushed further.  The root problem of students not performing to their full potential has to do with the inability to focus from drowsiness in class due to the lack of sleep they are getting.  To support this point, Carskadon, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior, and his team, “found that students showed up for morning classes seriously sleep-deprived and that the 7:20 a.m. start time required them to be awake during hours that ran contrary to their internal clocks” (Richmond).  In other words, Carskadon believes that current high school start times go against teens’ natural sleep patterns, making them be awake at a time where their bodies aren’t ready to get up yet.  This causes concentration issues making paying attention in class harder, and kids not getting the best grades they can.  Also, sleep won’t get any

Beep Beep Beep Beep. It is 5:30 A.M, you were up late last night working on an atrocious math assignment; and all you want is to roll over and ignore that you have to go catch the bus at 7:15 A.M. Sometimes, you’re lucky enough to get a ride or drive to school and get an extra five or ten minutes of sleep, while still making it to first hour in time for the pledge of allegiance. Then, by the time second hour rolls around it is only 8:30 A.M. This example shows school start times are affecting the teenagers and preteenagers of our generation. These early school start times are beginning to create a decrease in students grades, concentration levels, tardiness, absences, and the amount of sleep the students are getting each night. For the first time, the federal Center for Disease Control and Prevention is urging education policy makers to start middle and high schools later in the morning. The idea is to improve the students sleep and concentration levels during school. As you can see, high schools and middle schools should start later in the morning.

As a high school student, I live a very busy life. The amount of assignments I have to do require me to stay healthy as well as manage my time wisely. Once, I went to Grand River Hospital because I sprained my ankle during a basketball game. I arrived at the hospital at 10am and waited three hours for a doctor. This experience with the inefficiency of the Healthcare System helped me to understand the severity of the issue, which made me determined to support the idea of reform. Specifically, it was because of the precious time I sacrificed for the service. Instead of spending three hours waiting in the hospital, I could use them to do homework, read books and practice violin. The fact that I couldn’t use this time to accomplish these tasks meant the necessaries for me to finish them using time planned for other commitments. As a result, I would become more stressful due to the increase of difficulties to complete the tasks in a shortened time

Let's take a look at an average High School students day: John wakes up to his screeching alarm clock at 5:30 am after getting 6.5 hours of sleep, 2 less than the average teen is suppose to get, he pounds his alarm in frustration hitting snooze until 5:45. He is cut short on his 15-minute nap by his mom, someone who has been getting up at 5:30 for 10 years now, she yells to him “Get up, you need to get ready for school”. So John rolls out of bed and into the shower, he gets dressed and eats breakfast before he heads out to the buss that comes and picks him up at 6:10 am. Once at school at 7:10 am an hour later, he finds his seat in homeroom to finish some of his homework before school starting at 7:40 am. He attends classes, lunch, and study halls until 2 pm. John plays a sport and is part of a club, not too uncommon as kids look to stack their college applications with everything they can. He meets with his club from 2:00-3:00 pm, then has to hurry to practice which starts at 3:30 pm and runs until 5:50 pm. John now waits till he can get a ride home from a friend at 6:30 pm, getting him home in time for dinner which starts at 7 pm. He finishes dinner at 7:30 pm and has homework until 10:00 pm. After talking to his friends for an hour on his phone; it is now 11:00 pm, and John falls asleep, only to repeat the same tomorrow. No wonder high school kids are always tired. According to Judith A. Owens who conducted a study on; “Impact of Delaying School Start Time on Adolescent Sleep, Mood, and Behavior.” she states that teenagers need at least 8.5-9.25 hours of sleep a night; this is clearly not happening based on the average high school students day.

The end of 8th grade. Alex and I had spent so much time together. We fought a lot though, we hated each other for some time but in an instant we told each other we loved one another and went on to spend lots of time together. This happened many times during 7th and 8th grade. We built a couple groups of people that we would hang out with. Alex and I had made at least 20 close friends that we could hang out with any lunch or brunch. We had grown to be so close, and at the end of eighth grade he told me that he was moving. I felt horrible. I had made lots of friends, but the one person that I spent every day with was him. Alex and I spent a lot of time together before he left. But then he had to leave. I was kind of lost, I had friends but no

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

One day, I came across such a beautiful beast, poetry. It raised me, raised my soul to live better. Feeding me its wisdom every day, but it wasn’t always like this. In 9th grade, the beast held no significance to me, and we soon departed. In 11th grade, our paths crossed once more, holding the key to the door that remained locked in my heart. With my close friend, Angela, we’d unlock that door, only to find my true humanity. Through the months, my poetry and I would have evolved in many different ways.

I. For example, sports do not end until later in the evening therefore students do not really have time for their homework.

-School releases late, and the traffic adds even more time to get home. -Most kids do not start homework right when they get home.

    With these long school days children don’t have much time to go out and be a kid.  By the time children get home and finish all their homework, there really isn’t much time for sports or spending time with friends and family. Long hours of school put too much pressure on students.  According to the state, students are supposed to have three and a half hours of homework a night. Students are assigned about 17 hours of homework a week. There is a total of 168 hours in a week and 64 of those hours are taken from us by school and homework.  Out of the 24 hours in a day school, homework, and sleep take 18 hours, which leaves students with just 6 hours to do things.  Combine that with sports and after school activities, the average practice for most sports are 2 to 3 hours, which leaves the student with only 3 hours for themselves. If you add dinner into the equation which can take up to an hour ,then students only have two hours a day. Some students also have chores which can take up to an hour or even sometimes more.  What can a student do with only 1 hour of time a day for their personal goals.