According to Julia Ryan, studies show that out of students who get mostly A’s, 17% only get an hour of homework, and only 7% got 3 or more hours of homework. Students receive way too much homework leading to unhealthy lifestyles and poor grades. Teachers, if you really care about our education, then maybe it’s time to think about the amount of homework you assign.

Being a student in high school, I understand that teachers will need to give some homework every few days to help us practice study skills on our own, but when you, our teachers, give us too much homework we worry more about finishing it then the quality of our work.

During my freshman year of high school, many students, along with myself felt very stressed about the amount of homework given. For some people, the classes where we got the most homework were the classes where we learned the least and did the worst in.

According to a study published in the Journal of Experimental Education, students have an average of more than three hours of homework every night, and many of which getting more rather than less.

Our social lives are important, and we value the time we spend with our family and friends. Being social helps us to relieve stress and get through school together. It also has a number of benefits to physical and mental health including longer lifespan, stronger immune system, improving your mood, decreasing feelings of depression, and even a lower risk of dementia. “The results offer empirical evidence that many students struggle to find balance between homework, extracurricular activities and social time, the researchers said. Many students felt forced or obligated to choose homework over developing other talents or skills”(news.stanford.edu). We are also always being told to join clubs, sports, and other extracurricular activities but often are discouraged or worried that we will not be able to being so busy with homework after coming home from a day of learning. When we are spending most of our evening doing homework, we only have a little bit of time to spend being social or being active. For example: ne day after school, I had a game, and I didn’t get home until 8 pm. I also had a lot of homework and multiple tests the next day. I wound up staying awake until three am and soon found that I did poorly on the tests and on the homework questions too.

The amount of homework you give also causes a lot of stress in the lives of students and causes them to go to bed late which makes them not get enough sleep, which can be very unhealthy. Also, in a study, it was found that only 15% of teens get 8 ½ hours of sleep on school nights. According to sleepfoundation.org “During sleep, important body functions and brain activity occur. Skipping sleep can be harmful and even deadly, particularly if you are behind the wheel. You may feel moody, and you perform poorly. Sleepiness can make it hard to get along with your family and friends and hurt your scores on school exams…It can even help you to eat better and manage the stress of being a teen.”

According to the Washington Post, over 99 percent of surveyed students say that homework stresses them out, 56 percent say that homework causes most of their stress, and

43 percent say that tests cause most of their stress.

Homework can also have health consequences.

“Many students wrote that homework causes them to sleep less than they should and leads to “headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss and stomach problems” as well as a lack of balance in their lives” according to the Washington Post. 

I understand that teachers give homework to help students continue to learn, but when students go to bed later they will be more tired the next day which makes it harder for them to learn and obtain the key information that they learned that day.

According to Metlife, studies have shown that more teachers with zero to five years of experience give over an hour of homework than teachers with six or more years of experience. Teachers with more experience understand that giving minimal homework will help the students rather than hurt them.

Students spend 7 hours of their day at school with each class being close to an hour and teachers should have enough time to teach their lesson for the day while giving students time to start their homework. Giving an excessive amount of homework, teachers lead students into an unhealthy lifestyle; therefore, they should limit collective homework to 1-2 hours a night. If teachers assign less homework, then students will in turn be more motivated to do after-school activities, spend time socializing, and get a healthy amount of sleep.