By: Bill McKay
Football, basketball, volleyball, baseball, softball, track, golf, as well as other sports. Student council, key club, chorus, band, scholastic bowl, yearbook, history club, math team, FFA, FHA, and many other extra cirricular activities. These are a few of the several "extras" that kids are involved with in our high school.
English, Spanish, history, art, business, home economics, math, ag, science, and physical education. These are just some of the classes that high school students are required or end up taking. In just about all of these classes, you can expect homework. Students are getting more and more homework and less time to do it in.
Most teenagers have a job already, be it a part time or an everyday after school job. The average teen also is in at least three of the extra cirricular activities offered at our high school. As if this all were not enough, you have, as an example, a test in math to study for, an English report due, a project to complete for history, and about a chapter of Spanish vocabulary that you need to learn all by the morning.
Time is valuable to a teenager and prioritizing can be hard. Sometimes, it’s hard to understand that homework comes before a job. However, even if you did put homework before your job, you still struggle to find time for all your homework. Homework is something that , whether students like it or not, they have to do it. But, there is a point when too much homework is given, and, no matter how much you juggle your schedule, you just cannot fit it all in.
But is all the homework really necessary? I agree that everybody should have a certain amount of homework, but is a large amount really essential? As an example, you were just given a worksheet concerning math that deals with the same kind of problems. There are thirty problems on that worksheet. Practice, as they say, does make perfect, but isn’t that all just the tiniest bit redundant. One must also realize that students will not just be having this worksheet for homework, but will also be have several other subjects that they must be working on. I am just using math as an example, but all classes have their moments. Homework is no longer a learning experience, it is a punishment to all children (or at least that is how the students take it).
It is very easy for kids, as well as adults, to spread themselves "too thin", so to speak. That is, it is easy to become involved in so many things that you become flooded with work and less time to do it in. In other cases, because of their future, some kids just give up at the very beginning and not even start in on homework. This is the wrong way to approach the situation. If we, as students, wish to change this homework dilemma, let us first examine different ways to rid us of the current homework problem we are facing.
In order to change anything at all, the teachers will need ideas on how to go about making a new homework assigning plan. Who better to give them ideas then the very people that this whole matter is affecting. If you are interested in sharing your ideas on how teachers can go about changing our homework policy, please write down your idea and take it to one of the following places:
- high school learning center
- learning center
- Mrs. Wisdom’s room
