Despite being a second semester senior, I spend an obscene amount of time doing homework.
Of course, me in all my organized-ness, I have a system for getting my work done on time that I’ve refined over the last few years.
It starts on Sundays: I sit down and just brain dump all the tasks I need to do for the week – homework assignments, project checkpoints, any meetings I might have, studying for tests, posting Wingspan articles, and sometimes even emails I need to send or reply to.
Then I take all those tasks and spread them out over the week based on what needs to get done by when and how much time and bandwidth I have on a given day.
What I noticed this week, though, was even though I didn’t have very many tests – just an essay for AP Literature and an E1 for AP Physics C, I still had what felt like mounds and mounds of work each night.
So I took a closer look at my tasks and what I actually had to do.
Lo and behold, I had at least 8 chapters of textbook reading and notes for AP Government.
(I feel like it’s important to preface this next portion by saying that what I’m going to talk about has nothing to do with AP Gov as a class.)
Naturally, as one does, I got annoyed and it got me thinking about how much work is actually expected of students on a daily basis, even if it isn’t truly necessary or manageable.
Having five chapters of reading, averaging around 10 pages each, as homework for just one night with the potential of losing waterfall looming nearby is hard for me and I don’t have a life: I spend all my time at home.
Imagine how hard it would be for a student athlete or someone juggling multiple classes or serious family responsibilities after school.
And like I said earlier, this isn’t a phenomenon reserved for AP Gov. Classes like AP Biology (with dozens and dozens of slides of notes) or AP Human Geography (with its never-ending lists of vocabulary words) or even AP Calculus BC (with pages upon pages of homework that felt perpetually miskeyed) all demanded so much work on a daily basis that it soon started to feel insurmountable.
In any other setting, we would call it unhealthy for an individual to be expected to work all day from 9 to almost 5, then come home and work again till late into the night, and then spend all weekend playing catch-up for that same work. Not to mention sports, extracurricular activities, volunteering, family commitments, religious commitments, and college prep (SATs, ACTs, college apps).
I am by no means suggesting that we get rid of homework altogether – homework plays a crucial role in ensuring students actually remember what they learn and mitigating the forgetting curve.
What I am suggesting, however, is that we, as a society, acknowledge the fact that students are humans too and that school, however beneficial it is, is just as taxing and both physically and mentally demanding as a 9-5. Piling on hours and hours of homework on top of studying for tests and taking care of everything else that they need to take care of simply isn’t doing them justice.
It’s time that teachers, parents, and well-meaning community members recognize that there’s More to the Story than an addiction to our phones when it comes to being teenagers and give us a little grace as we chase our dreams, instead of burying us under mountains of busy work.
