As you may not know, in our kind of generation numerous of children and some even teachers complain about the piles of homework they get in a weekly base, on average secondary school pupils spend around 7 hours a week on homework.
Some say that homework can help to develop your ability to learning and work on your brain but does teachers not know the amount of stress pupils have to go through? And the number of hours that has been wasted for homework? Why waste our time with useless homework where it might not even help? Young students are better off spending more time with their family rather than doing homework.
Most people would say that homework causes anxiety and stress, leaving students very little time to spend with family and other things. Which is evidently true, even parents can agree to this standard. More than half of parents think that homework is a waste of time and it also adds extra stress for the students to cope with.
A study poll by Good Morning Britain revealed that 52% in favour of a ban and 48% against one. The survey that has been gathered by over 300 parents revealed that their children can find the homework a cause of “overwhelming” and damaging to their health and self-esteem. Such small thing can cause something so damaging, even your own mental health.
What’s shocking is that over 300 parents complained about this matter, you would think that parents should encourage their children to do their homework, however, parents seeing the pile of homework getting more bigger they feel broken seeing their children with numerous amounts of homework. Would other parents seeing their children at this state would be okay with it?
On the other hand, it may be different from another parent’s perspective. Practice assignments do improve scores on class test at all levels. A small amount of homework may help secondary school pupils build up study habit as. It can help them recognize that learning can occur at home as well as at school. Homework can foster independent learning and responsible character traits. Showing that pupils do show improvement in their learnings if they are able to achieve good scores in tests.
It is not all negative about homework, even a study in the UK showed that in 2014, it was concluded that students in Year 9 who spent between two and three hours on homework on an average weeknight were almost 10 times more likely to achieve five good GCSEs (A*, -C) than students who did no homework at all. Homework does not look that bad if a massive number of pupils are able to achieve good grades? This is already been proven by the UK study so why do people think it’s so bad? To some extent, homework can be good for you. That’s not the case.
Students actively less enthusiastic about learning because it is being forced upon them and it closes their minds. Having them work numerous hours on pointless homework that it might not even help them in the future. Homework can affect both students physical and mental health. A study revealed by Stanford University, 56 per cent of students considered homework a primary source of stress. Too much homework can result in lack of sleep, headaches, exhaustion and weight loss.
On the other hand, homework allows students to extend their learning, building on what they have learned in the classroom at home. Homework can be useful as a way of developing a student’s independent learning and research skills. Similarly, there is a clear argument to suggest that homework acts an excellent preparation for later life promoting self-discipline and time management and also helping young people to learn an important lesson. Spending more than 2 hours a night doing homework is linked to achieving better results in English, maths and science, according to a major study which has tracked the progress of 3,000 children over the past 15 years.
It’s not just students that are affected by this, teachers can also face the same burden due to homework. Homework places additional burdens on parents – who often don’t know how to help their children and it also places burdens on teachers as well, who have enough to do without having to collect, mark, and redistribute extra work for their pupils. It’s a struggle for both parents and teachers as parents might not be able to help their child and as for teachers, they already have a massive moment of teaching and preparing work for pupils in class to do, they can’t afford the time to mark all those papers and still enjoy a little free time.
They might even have to give up their weekends to mark homework, which is definitely not fair on them. Yes, they might have signed up to be a teacher but that doesn’t mean the head teacher have to assign every teacher to give out homework to the pupils and ask the teachers to make it, head teachers can’t take their weekend break away for some garbage homework. Working from 8am-4pm, even longer than spending the rest of their evening marking homework, and repeat the process. This is not what kind of treatment teachers should be getting they are making it harder for themselves.
A teacher, Cecily Hanlon, from Liverpool said that: “Homework is a waste of children’s time, teachers’ time and from what I have heard parents think it’s a waste of time as well. At this stage in their lives, homework mitigates against children who already have difficulties – if they have chaotic home lives, single parents, physical or mental illness.” Homework can not only face mental health problems but can also face family problems as well. People might think homework can just be a minor thing and it’s not a big problem on the other hand, wouldn’t you feel bad for a single mother/father working parents that are trying to work a living for their child and not being able to spend time with them or even help them out? How would you feel if that was you in that situation? There can be so many possibilities in the world that we cannot doubt on.
In the end, homework is not the only way of achieving better grades in school, homework only causes stress but the ability to be not able feel motivated in doing other activities. For students, if homework is a primary source of mental health then something should be done about it, we can’t just sit here and do nothing. Students already have enough to stress about when they are older, adding their piles with homework isn’t going to make it any better for them.