Argumentative Essay on Too Much Homework
Homework has been around for almost a thousand years and it always helps kids around the world with school, it gives them a refresh about a certain topic at home. But in the recent years, the amount of homework receive by children in K-12 grade are increasing at a tremendous rate, thus resulting in health problems such as sleep deprivation and stress, and not only that, too much homework can affect and child’s childhood, example lack of free time and family issues. The US doesn’t have the best educational system, not because of their intellect, but because the larger amount of homework receive by children today.
A survey was done, with 10 high-performing high schools, including over four thousand students. “56 percent of the students considered homework as a primary source of stress”(Stanford News). Stress can affect a person not only with the body but with a person’s mood. Stress can cause “headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation weight loss and stomach problems”(Stanford News). I also conducted a survey with series of questions, with one including “Does homework stress you out? with almost 21% of the students who took the survey, saying that homework stresses them out “all the time”, and 32%, saying it stresses them out “often” and 30% stresses them our ” every once in awhile”.
Stress can also cause anxiety, anger bursts, depressions, and sleep deprivation. Talking about sleep deprivation, sleep deprivation is an effect caused by homework. Over the past decades, the amount of homework has been increasing rapidly. Think of this analogy, native people are the majority of this landmass, let’s call that sleep, and then a small portion of that land belongs to explorers and colonist, let’s call homework. Now, over decades, more and more explorers and colonist, or homework, come into the land that belongs to native people and take them.
What happens is, that the people who are native to the land are now smaller, and now there are more colonist and less native land. This means the native people, or sleep has less land for themselves, in other words, with more homework, less sleep. I conducted and survey with a series of questions, one including “How many hours do you spend doing homework on a weekly basis?”, with over 40% of them spending more than 5 hours doing homework on a weekly basis, therefore the students have less sleep, resulting in sleep deprivation. Some of the effects of sleep deprivation are hallucinations, high blood pressure, memory loss, weak immune system, an increase in weight and depressions. The amount of homework received by students today is higher than those in twenty through thirty years ago. A survey was done in 1981, and on children, six through eight years old, who was giving homework on any day,was 34%, but escalate nearly to 60% percent in 1997, and up to 64% in 2002.
I conducted a survey of 7th and 8th graders around my location, with series of questions and one of those questions was, “Do you think you’re getting too much or too little homework?” with more than half of them saying that they are getting “too much”. Homework also affects a child’s behavior. With an excessive amount of homework, there is less time for extracurricular activities or free time in general. Not only that homework is a big issue at home. A survey was done with over 1200 parents whose children are between K-12 grade had a serious talk or argument about homework that included “yelling or screaming”. According to The Homework Myth, when a parent tries to help their kids on homework, it only creates more tensions, especially for the kids.
Also, according to The Homework Myth, some of the effects of “too much homework” is that a “kid losses cheer, self-confidence, sleep, and in extreme cases, childhood”. In conclusion, in rising amount of homework are affecting kids, with health, mental, and behavior problems. In order to end this, I suggest to trim homework by half and a set up a new system that won’t allow teachers to give a project to their students if he/she is working on another project for another class in order to reduce stress and health problem, and get exercise. With this in mind, this new system can pump up the US up to the top five best school system in the world.
