By EMMITT MURPHY

Homework has been required in academic settings for years, but is it really helpful for students? This question has been thrown around within the academic setting for decades since it’s invention in 1905 as a punishment.

Homework is an unhelpful tool to students and it is about time it is removed or at least decreased in schools. Homework does not only increase burnout and take up more of students’ free time, but it doesn’t improve academic abilities, as well.

Burnout has already been a problem for students in the Redlands Unified School District, making it hard for students to actually learn. This problem is escalated with teachers giving out homework on the weekends, which are supposed to be students’ break days. 

Redlands High School freshman Adrian Sandoval stated, “It’s a feeling that if you don’t face it, you feel even more disappointed, but if you deal with it, it ends with even more exhaustion — but that’s the only way to become calm and orderly again. If you don’t keep in the lines of managing time good and bad, it all ends up bad.”

The weekend homework point bleeds into the argument that homework takes too much of a students’ free time. Work life balance is constantly pushed in today’s society, but students are never able to achieve a healthy balance with the tons of homework pushed on them. Students are told that they should be able to have time outside of school, but the amount of homework received would tell them otherwise.

Citrus Valley sophomore Jasmine Rosales poses for a picture on November 12. The picture is supposed to symbolize the overbearing amount of work students receive.

With later start and end times, many students are unable to consistently get home at reasonable times. This means they could spend the rest of their evening doing tedious assignments that might not even help them.

This is the most common complaint among students: homework doesn’t help them improve academically. Alfie Kohn, an American lecturer and author with a focus on education, stated, “There is absolutely no evidence of any academic benefit from assigning homework in elementary or middle school.” 

Kohn also states, “At the high school level, the correlation is weak and tends to disappear when more sophisticated statistical measures are applied.”

What could be a solution to this homework problem? Simple, ban or decrease the amount of homework a student gets. 

Most, if not all, problems would be solved by just decreasing the amount of homework students get. Burnout would be decreased and students would have more free time without homework.

Homework has been a problem for most students for years and it’s about time something is done about it. 

It’s time districts learn what Doctor Kevin C. Costly of Arkansas Tech University has found in his research, that “In-school supervised study had a greater impact on achievement than homework, and achievement did not increase when students spent more time on homework.”