What exactly defines “too much homework”?
In reality there’s no real answer to the question above so I’ll tell you what I think. Feel free to disagree, as you most likely will. I’ll start by saying what I think the minimum amount to qualify as too much homework is and then I’ll move on to the next topic. I believe that more than 5 assignments given to a student to do by the next day is “too much homework”. But then you must think about assignments given to students that have a due date later than the next day. This, of course, is a tad bit more graceful but is still stressful just as assignments due the day after they are assigned are. I could type endlessly about my opinion, but I know that this isn’t about my opinion so now I move to the next topic.
Do teachers already assign too much homework?
As written in ghsnews1.com “According to most students, teachers assign too much homework.” But we cannot just look at one source, so I’ll list some others. According to Victoria Sordi in 2021 “Statistics demonstrate that too much homework can be harmful to students’ health, causing them to become anxious and burnt out.” I believe she makes a great point, and I fully agree with her on this. Sordi also states that “Most teachers assign roughly 1-2 pages of homework, which may not appear to be much at first, but when added together, it can easily overwhelm a student.” And she’s right about it not sounding all too much and how it’s actually very overwhelming to students. Teachers also may not realize that the amount of homework they assign is hard for students to finish because they are so used to teaching the subjects that it seems simple to them. I do believe that they assign too much homework. A leading reason why I think this is because of my experience this year in AP algebra. Most of your grade in the class stems from the homework and there are new things to learn every week that are in those homework assignments. This leads to students not understanding the subject enough to complete the homework and then getting a bad grade because of it. Every day that you have that class you get homework as well, so you must constantly learn and understand these new subjects if you want to pass. Now this is just one example from one class. It should be kept in mind that we have 8 classes in total.
Understanding the pressure.
To fully understand how all this homework affects student mental health we must focus on the pressure that Sordi hinted at. Mental pressure can be very hard to deal with for people; teenagers especially since their brains are in such a huge part of development just like their bodies. Most people don’t give much attention to the huge amount of pressure that is put upon students DAILY, but this really should not be the case. More attention to this pressure is absolutely necessary if schools want their students to learn healthily. Now, lets go back to what I said earlier about how hard it is to deal with this pressure. Students don’t really have time to cool off and relax because of homework and the thing is that homework makes students need to cool off and relax. You see what I’m saying, right? They’re putting in more of the problem and excluding time for a solution. More stress can also lead to amplification of mental illnesses such as major depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and most of all anxiety disorders. I cannot stress enough about what I am going to say next so please pay attention. I believe that if schools really want to help their students actually learn and understand things then they’ll focus less on dumping assignments onto them and more on helping the students actually understand what the homework is about in the first place.