Homework is one of the biggest stressors of high school. Everybody has those long nights of staying up to finish an essay, or coming into class and realizing you forgot to do last night’s assignments. All of these problems seem to stem from one big problem with homework: there’s too much of it.

     Research published by the Journal of Educational Psychology found that sixty minutes per night is the perfect amount of time for homework. Anything above seventy minutes was considered “too much”.

     The Wake County School homework guidelines state that every high school student should get 2 hours a night maximum (about 30 minutes per class). But as we all know, this isn’t always the case.

     PCNN put out a twitter poll asking students how many hours of homework they get each night, and 45% of them responded that they got 3 hours or more. Not only students, but some teachers also admit that they give more than their portion of 30 minutes of homework a night.

     Although it was previously said that the big problem with homework is how long it takes, there is one more issue: Content. The Wake County guidelines list only two reasons for homework to be given,

1. To enrich and extend school experiences through related home activities.

2. To reinforce learning by providing practice and application.

     Learning new content on our own is not on the list because it’s not considered a valid reason to give homework. All homework should support things we learned in class, and not the opposite; Many of you know this as the flipped classroom, and regardless of it being somewhat against the Wake guidelines, it is commonly used.

    So… who is to blame for the overworking of the students? The obvious answer is teachers. They assign the homework, and they control how much we have to do each night… so it’s their fault right? It turns out, it’s a lot more complicated than that.

     Each teacher is given a lengthy curriculum that they must get through in one semester. A lot of times, teachers do not have enough instructional days to teach all the information in class. This leaves teachers only two options: over assign homework to get through the curriculum on time, or never finish the curriculum and let students take the final unprepared. Notice that both these options go against the Wake County rules for teachers- one doesn’t comply with the accepted reasons and time bounds for homework and the other could potentially get the teacher fired. This issue is clearly caused by the lengthy curriculum given to teachers. If wake county were to give each class less information to learn, then learning time wouldn’t be as much of an issue.