Is More Always Merrier?

Throughout my journey at the Hanover High School,  I have felt at times that my teachers have been giving me too much homework.  I feel like the amount of homework that I get is too much. Also, I am not able to get nearly the right amount of sleep because of the two and a half hours of homework that I get per night. I also have many sports practices that affect the amount of time I have for homework.  Some people may say that doing a sport is my choice and that I don’t need to do it if I feel that I have too much homework, but if I want to live a healthy lifestyle, sports are healthy to make sure that I stay physically fit and that I am able to release some of my stress from school during practice.  Since I was stressed by the amount of homework I had, I wanted to find out how much homework was recommended and how much people at this school are getting.

This is a picture of some of the school work that Ivan Somoff has gotten so far this year

After doing some research on http://www.nea.org/tools/16938.htm, I realized that the average amount of homework that a senior of high school should be getting is 2 hours a night.  I then asked 10 different people, at least 1 from each grade how much homework they get on average per night.  The average amount of time doing homework for each student was 2 hours and 51 minutes.  This means that kids from all grades are getting almost a full hour more homework than a senior should be getting.  After asking a freshman what he would do with his time if he had less homework he said, “I would probably try to get more sleep or go outside and spend time with some of my friends.”   This means instead of stressing over work at night, he would either get sleep, which is healthy for your body, or spend time with friends which can be a really good way to reduce the amount of stress a person might have since they are able to distract themselves from the stresses from school and other activities.

The amount of homework needs to be lowered for the health of the students at Hanover High so they will get the most out of the information taught in each class.  Some ways teachers could do this are: coordinate with the other teachers in the grade to find out when the students have large amounts of homework in other classes, make a maximum amount of time that a student can spend on each subject, and make more long term assignments that would lead the students to spreading out the homework load.