Many students are suffering from stress and anxiety which researchers believe is due to excessive amounts of homework.

“Homework is stressful because we receive it every night in every subject,” said junior Erica Lops. “It all just piles up, so we panic.”

Teachers take it upon themselves to give students homework as practice and extra help for in school. But the amount students have been getting becomes larger, the older they get. So is homework becoming overwhelming or are students just becoming lazy?

Healthline.com states that the National Education Association (NEA) and the National PTA (NPTA) is enforcing an average of 10 minutes of homework each night, per grade level. For example, grade 1 students should receive 10 minutes of homework per night and grade 6 students should receive 1 hour.

Students are receiving an amount of homework that is causing them to either be up for hours or just not complete it. Mrs. Kathy Norton, head of the math, business and computer science departments, speaks about the issue.

“Homework is necessary when content needs to be mastered regardless of the discipline,” said Norton. “Busy work is unnecessary, but mastery of material is.”

Homework is a very significant aspect to gain effective results in the classroom, but too much of it has only caused stress. In order to gain the knowledge being taught in school, it takes a lot of work inside and outside of the classroom. Homework helps with this problem as long as the work is necessary for knowledge.

The amount of information students are expected to learn is slowly growing and the pressure put on students to have to know everything is at large.

With some students suffering many hours of homework each night, it has taken a big toll on their outside lives. Being stuck in a room all day doesn’t allow children to play outside or do other everyday things that makes a child a child. Even though education is very important, no one wants it to take over their life.

“Instead of getting 8 to 9 hours of sleep, which is recommended, children end up getting 5 to 6 hours of sleep which in itself contributes to increase in stress,” states outofstress.com.

The more students are being expected to do starts to drains on their incentive to work and their determination to do well in school. Oxfordlearning.com states that 40% of high school students are becoming disengaged from school. 

According to livescience.com, researchers have shown that an overwhelming amounts of homework can make students unmotivated.

After spending 7 hours at school, students want to come home and relax. As they get older, they start to spend long hours after school working, on top of having sports seven days a week. Being isolated from your family and friends is not good for a student’s childhood and their social life. According to huffpost.com, homework is consuming their free time and eating up their daily activities.

“Homework is difficult because we don’t have enough time to do it with other commitments we have after school,” said junior Lynn Wideberg.

Busy work has turned a lot of students to dislike homework. Getting repetitive math problems or essay after essay on books that no one has interest in borden’s children. According to huffpost.com, this eliminates the amount of time they are willing to spend on each assignment because of the overload they have to do.

Homework can be what you interpret it as, extra help or busy work, but stress is whether you allow it to happen or not.