It’s no secret that kids don’t exactly like homework, but it’s more than just a hassle. The burden of homework can detrimental to young people’s performance in school and overall health. It’s considered to be the leading cause of stress among students and sometimes this stress can be so severe that it causes panic attacks, stomachaches, headaches, anxiety and sleeping disorders.
I was hanging out with one of my friends last June when I found something I never thought I would ever see on a 16-year-old, silver hairs. Her response to my questioning about it was simple: stress. The last school year stressed her out so much that she started to go gray.This year, my junior year, is the first time I’ve found stress from school to have a visible effect on my health found clumps of hair on my pillow when I woke up. My enormous amount of homework made me anxious, and this was affecting my health and causing my hair to fall out. That’s messed up.
It’s messed up that while students are encouraged to have jobs and volunteer and participate in extracurriculars like sports and music lessons, we’re often burdened with two to five hours of homework a night. It’s messed up that kids my age need 8.5 to 10 hours of sleep to be healthy but I know nobody who gets more than eight regularly, mostly because they’re doing homework (I myself stayed up until 2 a.m. last night finishing AP Physics homework). And these people are getting younger and younger. A freshman I know told me that last year, in middle school, she would often get an average of four or fewer hours of sleep some nights because she would stay up late doing her homework and finishing projects. A 13-year-old should not be sleep deprived. This can have a direct effect on a student’s performance at school. A student who gets five hours of sleep just can’t give their best performance in class.
South Korea is considered to have some of the most rigorous academics in the world. Students there attend school two months months longer than Americans and for upwards of 16 hours a day, often staying at school until midnight or 1 a.m. They’re put under immense pressure to succeed. Most schools there don’t have sports teams or art programs, or anything else that might distract students from their school work. South Korea also has the highest suicide rate in the world, with 27.3 suicides per 100,00 people. It is possible that the pressure that Korean society puts its students through could be related to these suicides. This is obviously an extreme case, but it seems like America could be headed to the same destination. Now more than ever, high school students enrolling in intense and challenging college courses like AP Physics and U.S. History. College admittance has also become extremely competitive, and students are feeling the pressure.
Gray hairs? Dark circles? Why must I chose between my academic success and my health? Why isn’t seven hours of school enough? If we really cared about our nation’s children, we would stop assigning homework. They have enough to worry about.
