In high school, teachers and parents are constantly pressuring kids to participate in as many extracurricular activities as they can, all while going to school for seven hours a day and still having to do assigned homework when the day ends. Plus, these students are expected to get at least eight hours of sleep every night to rest. How can this be possible?

It’s not possible, and it sure isn’t realistic. Everyone can agree that getting involved in activities benefits us a lot, but what does homework do? Sports help us clear our mind and stay healthy. They even help some with personal problems; it’s a way to escape. Choir or the musical helps people do what they love. It’s a fun activity as well as learning how to control your voice or put your emotion into something beautiful. Homework does neither. All it does is make students despise the lessons they are learning and blind them from seeing what lessons are beneficial.

After all of the pressure and stress put on kids by adults, parents encourage their kids to get out and have fun. If they sleep all day, they are considered lazy, inactive, or anti-social. Adults do not understand the amount of work that is put on their kids during the week, therefore they do not understand why kids need to sleep all weekend in order to be re-energized for the next week full of more time consuming hard work. On top of all this, students are pushed to get a job to pay for food, clothes, a car, gas, and college. This isn’t fair to teenagers who are trying to work hard in school and get involved in all the activities they do.

My life is impacted by the amount of homework as well as many other students. On the average weekday, I wake up at 6:30 in the morning to get ready for school. Some days I get up an hour earlier to go to lifting for track, which means I am encouraged to go to bed even earlier the night before. I go to school for seven hours, then I’m off to track practice right away. I get home at around 5:30 pm, and have musical rehearsal for, on average, three hours. Some days I have jazz choir, violin lessons, orchestra, or speech mixed in with track and rehearsal. In addition, I’m expected to go home and study, do projects, and finish all my homework in order to get good grades. It ends up being around 10:00 when I start my homework since I get home at around 9-9:30 at night and still have to make and eat dinner. In all of this going on, I somehow have to manage to do chores as well. Usually, I get to bed at 11:30 or 12:00 at night when I finish all of the things in my schedule. That is five to six hours of sleep a night. Doing all of this is not healthy for students, and I say this with personal experience.

There is an easy solution to this problem. Instead of doing work at home, all learning should be done in class. It is the teachers’ job to teach their kids, and students should not be going home and doing the work themselves. Not only do they most likely forget what they learned, but it’s also a waste of time. The average student forgets most of what they learned in high school just after about three days. If kids learn in class and then take a quiz the next day, students will most likely learn more and get better grades. Another solution would be to cut each class a little bit short and add it to another hour at the end of the day so students have time to do their homework. This way, kids will have seven hours to have all their learning done, and then will be able to have time after school to do whatever they please. This is what high school should be about.

When people think of high school, they remember the fun times they had with their friends. They remember the sports, the football games, the musical, the school dances, and a bunch of other memorable activities that have nothing to do with homework. Homework is everyone’s least favorite part about high school and shouldn’t be a part of their already stressful lives.