I don’t like homework. This is honestly kind of funny because I want to be a teacher after college and will most likely give homework. The only reason I will be giving homework is because with math specifically, you need to practice to be able to understand the concepts. This by all means does not mean teachers should assign hours upon hours of homework a night because students need to have time to be themselves without freaking out about school work. My idea is that at most students should have a total of one hour of homework a night. I feel like that is reasonable as long as the student doesn’t procrastinate, it shouldn’t take that long. When I was in high school, my entire life revolved around school. Sure, I did two sports in high school with a total of eight seasons of sports and was at school some nights until 7 or 8. But I always spent most of my time doing homework. When I would get home, I would get to homework right away then usually go to bed around midnight. Then I would always wake up at 5 am to finish my homework. AND even then, I didn’t get around to doing every single thing of my homework. I just don’t understand why teachers think it alright to do this. I get that most teachers hand out a syllabus with all the homework for the entire year and ‘you can get a head start on it’, but should I spend ten hours one day ‘getting a head start’? The answer is no. Students need to chance to breath with confusing times in their lives. Like if their parents are getting divorced, they are going to therapy, they don’t live with their parents, they are sick, etc. I feel like most times teachers may have no idea what is going on at someone’s home, but thinks its alright that since they slept in class to give them another assignment, where they might not have a bed to sleep in at night. And then another situation comes up when students are now in college. I’m not sure this is a hundred percent correct, but I remember one of my professors last semester that every hour we have of class we should spend two hours doing homework and/or studying. So, right now I am taking eighteen credit hours. So I guess that means outside of these seven classes I am taking (one of them is zero credit hours, but still I attend every week [or at least until my school shut down]) I should be doing thirty-six hours of studying/homework. Now, let’s think about it mathematically (lol I’m a math major). If I’m spending eighteen hours in class every week with thirty-six hours on top of that studying, I am spending 54 hours a week on school. So, how much time does that leave for me? Let’s think about it again, there are 24 hours in a day and seven days in a week so, there are one hundred and fourteen hours for me. But, that seems like a lot, let’s account for sleep. People say that adults need about 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night. So, lets take the average and we get eight. So, if I have one hundred and fourteen hours to myself, but need 56 hours of sleep a week, I have 58 hours to myself. But, that still seems like too much. It feels like too much because most students are involved with clubs, sports, etc. on campus or in their school to stay involved and meet people. Sometimes, people join these things to add to their applications, so that they have a chance of impressing a college showing what they can bring to their school. So, right now I am involved in three clubs. It takes up about 6-9 hours a week. Let’s take the average again, so that’s about 7.5 hours. So, in total we have about 50.5 hours to yourself. OH WAIT! There’s still this funny thing called being healthy. If I need thirty minutes of physical activity a day and eating a meal takes twenty minutes, then I have forty hours a week to myself. This is less than two days, while spending all my time towards school takes more than two days. I understand that I am paying for this education and I want it, but why do I need to spend thirty-six hours out of class working on class work? One of my professors only assigns one homework assignment a week that usually takes me an hour in total and I am doing the best in this class compared to all my others. I should have time to be myself without worrying about every little thing in school. Students can’t be bombarded with work because then they won’t complete it and then they’ll be doing even worse than where they would normally be because sadly enough homework is usually a big part of grades. My teachers in high school claimed it was a way to earn easy points to help boost your grade, but all I thought about it was that it took me hours on end to earn twenty percent of my grade, but tests were usually forty percent, so was it really helping? There is a large debate on whether or not homework should be a thing for students anymore. And frankly I don’t know what should happen. I do know that elementary school students should not have homework. They can have out of school work with their parents like making dinner to teach them about fractions or something fun along those lines, but homework when you’re five is detrimental because for some reason it always seems to end in the child or parent crying. In middle school, it should be introduced, but maybe not have homework every night. Then in high school it should grow because students need to become more independent learners, but again not bombard them with hours upon hours a night of homework. So, this was a rant session and I’ll be surprised if anyone made it this far, but I am just sick of homework. So, I want to say here that I will not assign one hundred problems of math as homework when I am a teacher, but maybe ten good ones that surround the lessons that were taught that day. Homework just needs to go away. Thank you.
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