Argumentative Essay: Should Teachers Give Student Homework?

Teachers these days are giving way too much homework and it’s little to no good. Studies show that less than one percent of students think homework is not a stressor. The average sleep time for students decreases from 7. 6 to 6. 9 hours from grades 9 to 12. Richard Walker, an educational psychologist at Sydney University, shows that there is no correlation between amount of time spent doing homework and test scores. This is important to all students and teachers because teachers give students a large amount of homework for no reason.

Should teachers give students homework? No, teachers should not give student homework. Teachers should not give any homework because there is less time for students extracurricular pursuits, students are losing sleep over homework, homework adds large amounts of stress, it does more bad than good to grades, and it does not actually help reinforce what is learned in school. Teachers often do not realize how much their homework affects their students. The homework that teachers assign negatively affects a student’s social life and extracurricular activities.

Denis Pope, a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, says that, “Students are not meeting their developmental needs or cultivating other critical life skills. ” Students have many life skills they need to learn through socializing and doing extracurricular activities. Teachers make it so that students lose a large portion of that time due to homework. “Many students felt forced or obligated to choose homework over developing other talents or skills,” Pope says.

This fact is really sad because there could be so many more great students with amazing alents but their teachers give them too much homework and they feel obligated to do it. If teachers did not give any homework then students would have the free time to do extracurricular activities and develop all the talents and life skills the need to be successful as adults. Students feel so obligated to do homework that it affects other things as well. Students are losing sleep because of homework. This is proven in a test run by Craig Canapari, “They studied 535 kids through high school.

The average sleep time for these kids diminished from 7. 6 to 6. 9 hours of sleep from 9th to 12th grade. ” The reason these kids are losing sleep is because of the amount of homework the teachers are assigning increasing. Losing their sleep has some ry negative effects on students, such as increased stress and the inability to focus in school. “Results suggest if a student sacrifices sleep time in order to study more than usual, he or she will have more trouble understanding material in class,” Canapari says.

Teachers give students homework to supplement what they do in the classroom, but in reality the student has to sacrifice sleep time and that negatively affects what they do in the classroom and adds stress. Homework adds large amounts of stress to a student’s life. Denis Pope’s study concluded that 56% of students see homework a primary source of stress. This means that over half of the students think homework is the number one source of stress in their lives.

All the deadlines and pressure to get things done on time and well really add up to make a great deal of stress for students. Pope also found that less than one percent of students do not find homework as a stressor. Less than one percent. This means that homework adds stress to over 99% of students. It is crazy that this happens and teachers do not care enough to stop giving homework. Stress decreases a student’s performance in all aspects of their life, including in the classroom where the homework is supposed to help the most.

Homework does more bad than good to students grades. Teachers think that giving homework is another way for students to increase their grade, when in reality it ends up lowering it. Richard Walker, a psychologist at Sydney University, says that, “Data shows that in countries where more time is spent on homework, students score lower on a standardized test called the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA. ” Students go through a 6. 5 hour day of school, doing work all day, and then have to do more when they come home.

The teenage brain is not capable of taking that much stress and workload so when they get home and have to do more work they are not really focused on what they are doing, making the homework ineffective. Walker also says that, “The same correlation is also seen when comparing homework time and test performance at schools within countries. ” This shows how useless homework is in raising a student’s grades and helping the student learn. Teachers and most other people believe that homework is to help a student in reinforcing what they have already learned in school.

Practice makes perfect right? Well not too much practice. In a normal school day teachers will assign classwork and then homework. Classwork is good in a structured non-distracting environment and that is enough repetition for almost all students to reinforce what the teacher has taught them. All the classwork from the 6. 5 hour school day wears the student out and when they get home and have to do more work they aren’t really focused or dedicated to it. This causes the homework to be ineffective and unnecessary in the way of learning. Students should not receive work to do after school.

It causes students to miss out on social and extracurricular activities, it causes them to lose sleep, it adds great amounts of stress, it does more bad than good to their grades, and most people think wrong about homeworks effects. Almost all people, including teachers think that homework positively affects a student’s performance in the classroom and increases their grades. But in reality it’s too much for the student and its becomes uneffective. How did homework affect your life? Were there moments you wish you could be off doing something positive but you had homework that you needed to do?