November 3, 2016

Dear Future President,

Homework should be abolished. Students are spending too much of their time after school and/or school activities doing homework. Since they are doing homework, it is taking time away from their family and the people who care for them most. Homework is also a high source of stress. Researchers studied that when it came to stress, more than 70 percent of students said they were “often or always stressed over schoolwork,”with 56 percent listing homework as a primary stressor. Less than 1 percent of the students said homework was not a stressor. As you can see, almost all of the kids with homework are stressed. Two-thirds of students say that they used alcohol and drugs to cope with stress. Some others take their stress out on friends, family, or even activities.

Students have so much homework and are spending too much time doing it. While others complain to their parents and they do it for them so they can get good grades. As a freshman in High School, I receive about 1-2 hours of homework each night. And little 1st graders are receiving approximately 30 minutes of homework each night. The National Education Association (NEA) and the National PTA (NPTA) say we should have“10 minutes of homework per grade level”. That means we are getting too much and we have a reason to be stressed. It is proven that kids in early elementary school have been receiving about three times the amount of recommended homework. Also in the Stanford study, many students said that they often did homework they saw as "pointless" or “mindless.”

Students normally start school in pre-school and then work their way up until their senior year of high school. That is 15 years of schooling. There are 180 days of school a year so that means you are in school for 2,700+ days. If we get into counting hours, we are in school for 7 hours a day so it would be 1260+ hours a year. It would be 18,900+ hours just for your early schooling and high school years. With all of this being said, none of that is counted with all of our homework each and every night.

We could fix our problem by having the teachers give us less homework and we could learn everything during class. If we do not get everything done in class then we will understand that we may have a little bit of homework but that is not as stressful as 1-2 hours of it. We could even possibly work in groups to bounce ideas off of each other and also help with our teamwork. Please take all of this into consideration when you are thinking about this stressful topic.

                                                                                                                                                                   Thank you,

                                                                                                                                                                            Annie