Benjamin Ramirez

Mrs. Storer

English 3H

24 October 2019

How much is too much?

All teachers talk about how their homework is necessary, about how we need to improve

our skills, and how practice makes perfect, I do not think any of them know how much

homework they truly assign.

By social definition, I am technically a nerd. I take all the honors and AP classes. Even in

regular classes, teachers can assign a mountain of homework. However, when you add in the

APs and the honors classes, it becomes much crazier. From a poll taken for an English project,

most students agree with their five hours of sleep. Most students are averaging five hours of

sleep which says nothing about the amount of homework that forces them to that point.

Every AP or honors student faces hours of homework each day. For scholar athletes or

any student who does any extracurriculars, they have even more trouble with homework. I am

one of those students. I usually come home from cross country around 5 pm each day. After each

day, I get to face hours of homework. Unfortunately, I do not always have time for all of it.

The most recent example is actually yesterday. After cross country practice, I came home

for my homework. After starting homework at 6, I worked until 11:30. Even with the almost 6

hours of homework, I was not able to get all of it done. I still ended up with an essay untouched

and tests unstudied.

 For all the homework assigned, there are not enough results produced. All the piles of

homework do not always give proper test results. I have often done poorly, despite doing all the

homework and preparing. An example is AP French; we have a daily vocab test. Each day I try

to work on studying vocab. Unfortunately, I do poorly on many of them. I never have time to

study all of the vocab, and it is slowly bringing my grades down. Pointless homework such as

this has not helped me.

In these kinds of situations, I am forced to stay up later. The more homework that I do to

prepare for the test, then the less sleep I get before the test. This delicate balance is something

that I always consider carefully. If I sacrifice time for rest, then I can study. However, if I do not

sleep properly, then I will not have proper rest before the test.

For AP Biology, our teacher likes to assign us a minimum number of notes per chapter.

We are required to take eight pages minimum of notes. Every week, I struggle with this. Instead

of allowing us to learn however we prefer, we are forced to learn how the teacher prefers. Some

students may learn by reading or interacting. The problem is that she does not allow our freedom

to learn. If we do not learn from the specific style of learning, then the homework becomes

pointless for us and it only damages our productivity.

These examples of pointless and tedious homework are damaging to student’s academics.

When teachers say that they do not assign much homework, they are not only wrong, but the

homework assigned is often unhelpful to students. I believe that some teachers should be more

open to students input.