On average, the American high school teachers assign about 3.5 hours of homework a week, which, with around five other classes, equals out to as much as 17 hours a week. An hour’s worth of homework is assigned every night to kids as young as six years old. Many people link homework with better achievements, but homework is counterproductive in many ways.

There are twenty four hours a day, and if you take away eight hours of sleeping and six hours of school; that leaves ten hours, but once you add in the 3.5 hours of homework, you’re left with six hours of free time. That would be fine, except for all the sports, clubs, and all of the activities the average high schooler is involved with. What about jobs, spending time with the family, going outside, and hanging out with friends?

How is anyone supposed to have time to relax? Not to mention that teenagers need at least nine and a half hours of sleep, but the average teenager gets seven hours of sleep. Speaking from personal experience, homework can lead to a resentment and negative attitude toward school and schoolwork in general.

More often than not, students get into the habit of copying off their friends in an attempt to get it all done. In the American school system, so much emphasis is put on simply getting all your work done, and not enough on what a student actually knows. Intelligence and memory are not the same thing.

College admissions criteria are based almost entirely off SAT scores, GPA, and activities. Teachers and parents insist that homework helps you practice what you’re learning and helps you prepare for college. So, if all the homework we’re being assigned is so crucial and important, how come PISA results in math, reading and science have not changed for the last fifteen years?

Homework is just another source of stress that high schoolers have to deal with. These students also have to deal with family fights, friends’ drama, unrequited crushes, and all the other nonsense that comes along with high school; not to mention that homework is often counted for participation and thrown in the trash afterward.

Most homework isn’t even given back to students, so students can’t see what they’ve done right or wrong. Also, at home students are limited access to a teacher or someone to ask questions, since modern assignments don’t often match up with a parent’s knowledge of the subject.
High schoolers have a lot of stress put on them about what they’re going to do, how they’re going to get into college, and what college they’re going to; but how are they supposed to pursue their passions and figure out what they want to do with their lives when they have no time to do it? Despite how much people argue that homework has academic benefits, there is no evidence to support the theory. In fact, researchers in China have linked sleep disruption with two or more hours of homework. In conclusion, I am bitter.