We believe that homework should be eliminated from school for several reasons, our main reasons being that it adds stress on students, students may not have time to complete homework, and it affects relationships and friendships negatively. Although teachers who assign homework may say and think that homework is practice and can help with mastery of skills, many other individuals would disagree.
Firstly, having homework can cause serious stress. This is because kids may feel pressured and anxious since they have to deal with getting work done in class and having to do even more work at home. Research has shown this constant stress can later lead to health consequences such as headaches, emotional regulation issues, and other problems for children. We, ourselves both have had many experiences with stress due to our heavy homework load. Rather than resting at home after a long school day, we stay up panicking over the assignments that are due the very following day.
Another reason why homework should be eliminated is that some students may not have enough time to complete their homework due to other responsibilities. Most kids nowadays are involved in various extracurricular activities such as sports, performing art academies, and more. Assigning too much homework may force kids to forgo after-school activities that are very important to them and help them develop crucial skills. Some students may still have enough energy to try and complete their homework in addition to their other commitments, but they usually have to stay up late into the night to finish that assigned task. This is a serious problem because they are losing hours of sleep that are much needed. According to studies, not getting enough sleep causes the brain to grow just as exhausted as the body can and it will not be able to operate the way it normally does. Not only does homework make students not feel the same way about something they were passionate about, but also adversely impacts their health.
Furthermore, homework can affect relationships negatively. Homework takes away time to socialize with those around you. As a result, this can cause severe problems such as hostility, speculation, and isolation from others. Not only does it affect students but it also influences families by increasing conflicts and stress. During our pre-teen and teen years, it is crucial to foster relationships and develop our social skills, something we won’t be able to do with so much homework.
Some people may say that homework can help with academic success by practicing what you have learned at school. Although this may seem great, there are some flaws. A main problem with this argument is that with high-achieving students, homework does not help them as they have already mastered these skills. And for students who are not passing their classes, they may not be doing the homework anyway and are falling further behind in their missing assignments. Another issue is that many students are simply relying on sites like ChatGPT or other sources to get the assignments done for them, making homework a waste of time and useless.
In conclusion, we believe that homework should be eliminated. Even if homework is not able to be eliminated completely, some thing that we can do to limit the workload is to only have students do homework for a set amount of time. Another alternative would be to only assign homework as a consequence for kids who don’t pay attention in class. Eliminating homework or altering how and what we assign students would help them have a more productive and efficient learning experience.
