Are you aware of the time you spend on homework every week?
As your role in student body changes and you are accepted into higher levels of education, homework is inevitable. For high school students who typically have 5 different teachers, or even more, roughly 17.5 hours a week are spent on homework each week (2.5 per day of the week); middle school students have 3.2 hours of their week taken up by homework (approx. 27 minutes per day of the week); kindergarten-fifth grade teachers assign 2.9 hours per week (around 25 minutes per day). So why do high school students have SO MUCH homework?
Well here is the reality of it..
From a teachers perspective, homework is a way for them to get through the curriculum quicker and provide students with graded practice for their end of the year final, PSSA, keystone, SAT etc, while most students see it as a time consuming task. There are a select few of students who actually like to have their time taken up by calculus and the French and Indian War but most of the student body does not. In the Stanford Report, the official news publication and communications channel for Stanford University, studies show, in a sample survey of 4,317 students from 10 different high performing schools, that 56% of students considered homework to be a primary source of stress in their life. So you can see the conflicting opinions here.
As someone who does well in school and has actually found a way to balance most things in my life, homework is one of the first things to distract me from how well I am doing. Some days when I find myself immersed in homework and its a good feeling to crank out 50 math problems and have them be done but thinking about it during the entire school day makes me super anxious. We know that a teacher’s intent is not to make us overwhelmed but if we cannot complete the homework because we might have been thinking about something else during the lecture or even working on overdue homework, that is the cycle stress that most students experience.
When you were little, did you have more time and spend more time with your family? Did you miss out on sports bonding because of homework? When we think of our lives before high school when we had 25 minutes of homework a day, we reflect on all of the cumulative time out of our life that we have put into school. So.. as I said before, it is inevitable to escape homework so doing work to your best ability for 4 years is worth having a lifetime worth of freedom.
