Does Homework Help or Harm?

We bet at least once you dreamt about moving to a kind of wonderland where students don’t have to do their homework every day. It may sound unreal, but such fairytale countries where kids spend only a couple of hours per week on homework exist. They had gone through a long way of trial and errors before realized all pros and cons of homework and introduced innovative changes into their system of education. However, why does the necessity of homework remain a topic for a debate, where the opposite side stands for giving as many home assignments to students as possible? It, therefore, sparks a question whether homework is actually harmful or helpful.

Fresh View on Beneficial Side of Homework

Most of the world developed countries hold a bunch of arguments in favor of homework. The recent pros were maintained by an award-winning teacher, Jody Stallings, from Charleston, South Carolina, who’s been giving homework to his students since 1992 and doesn’t seem to ever change his mind. He sums up all known advantages of homework to prove that any assignment given by a competent teacher does make sense. Citing the Center for Public Education, Stallings points out several main benefits of homework which contribute to a general development of personality, prepare children for adult life and help to build life goals:

• It fosters responsibility in children
• It improves time-management skills
• It develops study habit to make a kid be concentrated on a task until it is done

To advocate his view on the merits of homework, Jody also argues that it is simply impossible to learn say a quadratic formula within several classes without reinforcing and practicing it at home. It appears a real test to see whether any material can be recalled and applied outside of the classroom setting. Well, of course, you may try also reading a whole book during a lesson or learning the whole history of the Civil War but you’ll hardly succeed but stop believing those who say that everything may and should be learned in class.

Why Homework is Traditionally Accepted as Good

One of the important roles of homework is the opportunity to revisit the lesson if it is needed. The teacher can tell from the student’s homework if it was successfully taught and properly understood. The students, in their turn, can see from the homework if they need to ask more questions or devote some time to more practice.

Besides, let’s try not to forget that it’s 21^st century outside and the modern teaching has developed to have a slant towards practical applications for any lesson. Rather than understand the times tables by reciting verbatim, they are now presented in real life situations. Pupils need to be able to walk away from the classroom and apply what they have learned in their everyday life. This is no better demonstrated than through homework. The support structures of the classroom are diluted – the teacher isn’t there, the kid that you sit next to can’t give you the answer and the textbooks are locked away in the school. Every student has to work things out for themselves.

The latter, the power to work thing out and make their own discoveries, is one of the most important experiences for school-age children that aids in forming the attitude towards learning and life itself. It fuels the willingness to study and gives them the desire to learn more.

Do Drawbacks Outweigh Merits?

Do you still feel hatred to homework after all these pluses? Definitely, a bit. And the reason for it comes to be, “why do I have sooo much homework?”, huh? Dear student, your opinion about the amount of homework is very important for every teacher when he or she assigns it (no). There has always been and will always be badly designed homework. Moreover, studying programs are becoming more complicated with every passing year, hence the amount of homework also increases. No doubt, tasks in one or two subjects seem easy for a student to cope with after school, but the reality is opposite: one has to prepare a great deal of work in every subject every night covering just anything from math to i-don’t-know-what-on-earth-this-is-ology. And you’re simply lucky if tomorrow you are not going to take a test. However, in fact, your homework might be managed like this if the scheme was widely accepted

Here the problems begin. To get stress and a nervous breakdown in such conditions is as easy as to snap your fingers. The constant stress from homework leads to sleep deprivation, mood shifts, lack of free time to at least distract oneself from studying if not to mention time for hobby or sports. Health problems are just around the corner offering to pick any from the list:

• poor eyesight
• postural disorder
• sleep deficiency
• fatigue and depression
• gastrointestinal upset connected with all mentioned, etc.

And as a cherry on top come anger and frustration as the parents try to get their kids to complete everything to bring good grades.

What may also surprise you after all is the experiment conducted by Brandy Young, a teacher from Texas, who decided to stop giving homework to kids. That caused a half a year dispute but later on proved that… nothing changed! No, really, nothing. The academic performance was not influenced and children instead became better creative thinkers and started to read more on their own. Fortunately or not, these no-homework policies were implemented in elementary school, so we have to only hope that similar experiments will become a common practice to be held in high school and college to find out what results students of different ages show without doing homework.

Try Expert Help when Homework Harms You

Concluding, let’s not seek only good or bad points in the issue of homework. It surely is sometimes an evil, but a necessary one. And here we are not going to draw you over to doing your homework or not doing it, but instead, we want to offer our help. No matter how hard your tasks are,  AssignmentExpert.com service will assist you with any assignment in any subject, so when you either don’t have time or can’t understand a quadratic formula, we are ready to help you online 24/7. Here you may ask teachers and other experts who work for us any questions without being afraid to be judged for not knowing physics or programming, or whatever. You are welcome to contact us anytime and put your burden on our shoulders.