Why do we have homework?

I’m sure each one of you has pondered this question before. Homework is, after all, something that affects all of us each and every day.

School is where knowledge is introduced to you. At school, our teachers make sure we understand the material presented to us each day, and that we can make use of for future reference. In my experience, significant information is not completely secured into long-term memory without repetition. Repeating the work with different problems than those you did in class fortifies that knowledge and ensures your recollection of the previous information.

We are bombarded with homework, and it becomes laborious. Students have a significant number of activities such as clubs, musical classes, sports, and other time requirements. Students rarely have much spare time for a task other than schoolwork. A result, balancing their curricular activities and their education is near impossible. Even when we need to take state exams, we are assigned homework. This results in nothing more than homework that is done in a rush, then completed in a messy manner, and that has a negative effect on the quality of the work, because the amount of work is intolerable.

The effects of too much homework lead to students handing the work in late, or not at all. Even worse, plagiarizing takes place when students are rushed. The instructor and the students do not attain anything from homework like this, because students are not engaged and are unable to increase their interest towards the subject and are simply satisfied with getting through the class rather than learning.

Stanford researcher Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a co-author of a study published in The Journal of Experimental Education, found that too much homework has a negative effect on children, primarily in their lives off school premises, where social interaction is of importance. Too much homework can make students’ lives very stressful. Stress stems from the pressure of family, studies, and life in general. The teacher’s prime focus should not be only on student’s results, but the burden of the workload they have. They may not be willing to engage in the lesson of the class and wouldn’t voluntarily want to attend the school. Too much homework can lead to disabling the students’ ambition to learn in school.

Homework is imperative for strengthening academic performance and for understanding what was taught in class. Homework is beneficial to students because it can consolidate students’ knowledge and their intellectual life, but too much homework can lead to far too many negative impacts. Students with too much homework, don’t have the proper rest and the quality of their homework suffers, making the student feel stressed. Therefore, only a specific amount of homework should be assigned if we really want kids to be successful.