Students Today have too much Homework
Students today are being overwhelmed by
homework. Homework used to be an activity for review with the occasional
project, but now it has just become busy work that drills information into a
student's mind. This may help kids remember certain formulas in math or rules
in literature, but it doesn't help them fully understand it. It is subtracting
time from a student's day and adding stress to a student's life.
According to an article by Tim Herloff in
a "Time For Kids Magazine", students ranging from eleven to thirteen
years old got about two hours of homework a week in 1981. By 1997 that time
almost doubled to three hours and forty minutes per week, and in 1999 its about
five hours of weekly homework. However, according to a poll of public teachers
in the article, "About 3.5 hours of homework a day for high schoolers?
That's to much" by Karin Klein, high school students get about
seventeen hours of homework each week and three and a half hours of homework
each day.
These statistics show two things, one
students now get to much homework, and two, the rate at which this homework
level increased was exponential. Students get a lot more homework than their parents did, even if I am comparing middle school homework to middle school homework levels, the difference is still enormous. Also, keep in mind that this was only about 33 years ago.
This means if students get about three and a half hours of homework a day, that
is more than their parents got in a week on average. Also, if you include the
homework, students in high school work about one and a half hours longer, on
average, than an adult working as a full time employee.
However, is important, and a study from
the article by Tim Herloff states that students who do just fifteen minutes of
homework score 65% better than kids who don't do any homework. On the contrary,
many parents interviewed in Tim Herloff's article state that their children
often seem stressed about their levels of homework, sometimes to the point of
being sick.
Homework is important, and will never go
away, but there should be less of it. When students are becoming ill due to the
stress caused by large amounts of homework, the homework levels need to drop. Part of being a kid is being social and having fun, but when all of their time is spent doing homework, students can't enjoy their childhood as much.
