Picture this: You just got home, you had a really tiring day at school, your head hurts, and all you want to do is collapse on your couch and watch some TV. You have baseball practice in half an hour and you won’t get home until it’s dark outside. Your mom and dad come downstairs and greet you with the usual “How was your day?”. You respond with a “bleh…” and they give you an apologetic frown before asking “Well do you have any homework?”. You throw your head back and groan, realizing that you had at least two worksheets for each class you had. Now you have less than half an hour to do homework, eat, and try to calm down… this isn’t gonna work. 

Teachers give way too much homework, whether it’s essays, bookwork, worksheets, or something online, they give way too much of it, and it’s affecting students for the worse. Teachers everywhere are giving students a really hard time, giving them pages after pages of assignments to do at home. I know some teachers who give out essays as homework, and it’s really stressful and adds on to the pile of homework I already have. 

The homework is pointless half of the time, worksheets, essays, books reports, and much more hardly ever help any students learn, they just cause stress. The point of worksheets are for students to get extra practice in and give them a better understanding of the material. They can be helpful sometimes, but it depends on what the sheet is over, and what type of worksheet it is. Math worksheets help, because to learn math, you have to understand it. But English and Social Studies worksheets give us nothing, they’re pointless and don’t help us at all, they just stress us out. 

The stress from the worksheets can easily be removed. Teachers shouldn’t pile on information at once, they should give one or two worksheets in class instead of having two or three for homework. If they do assign worksheets for homework, they should give us twenty minutes or so before and after class to complete them. 

The other homework we have can be way too much as well, essays, book reports, projects, and other types of work. I know many people who almost always have an essay to do over the weekend, or read a pointless book every night of the week. I don’t really understand the point of telling students to read or write at home, even though teachers know students aren’t going to. If you give us time to work on it in class, we’ll put in at least twice as much effort rather than doing it in ten minutes at home. 

 The stress from the homework can easily be removed. Teachers shouldn’t pile on information at once, they should give one or two worksheets in class instead of having two or three for homework. If they do assign worksheets for homework, they should give us twenty minutes or so before and after class to complete them. The essays and book reports shouldn’t be assigned as homework either. We should have at least half a class period to write the essay, and if we don’t get them done, then we can finish it at home. We should also have twenty or so minutes to read and work on the book reports. If we just had opportunities to work on it in class, it would get done and everyone would be satisfied, the work would be done with good effort and students get less stress, and more personal time. 

On average, 6 out of 10 students have extracurriculars and/or sports, which teachers encourage so students barely have any free time. Sports have practice most days of the week and clubs have meetings some days. These activities have stress that come with them, and sometimes it’s hard to deal with if you also have school stress to worry about. 

The students barely have any time for homework, and if they make time for their homework, they’re skipping things they would normally do to relieve stress, such as eating, sleeping, and spending time with their family and friends.

So, everyone’s stress can be relieved by teachers cutting back on all of the homework. If students get a few minutes in class to do it, their stress will calm down and their grades will go up.