The four day Thanksgiving weekend was a time for people to be thankful for things in their life; one thing students weren’t thankful for was all the homework they received.
Homework during vacation is a burden on students. Instead of them being stress-free and enjoying time with their families, they are worried about the amount of assignments they have to complete.
“Over the Thanksgiving break, I received AP Calculus, English, and AP Computer Science homework, which was a lot.I felt very unhappy and under tremendous pressure because I spent most of my time trying to complete my homework instead of enjoying my time with my family. One of my assignments took me a day and a half to complete because of different components to it. Overall, I did not enjoy or felt good during this break.” said Diantha Gardener, a senior at Edison.
Not only are students getting depressed, studies have shown that their learning skills aren’t improving as much. A study done by a senior lecturer at Stanford University, Denise Pope, found that high school students have only two hours to learn while doing homework. Students begin to hate their classes because homework turns into a chore to them and they end up copying it from others.
Photo Credit : Safeeya Samad
“The problem is that many, depending on your teachers, many homework assignments run the nature of textbook homework which the student or the teacher isn’t consensus about reading student responses that answers can be duplicated so there can be cheating involved,” said Maria Baker, a Social Studies teacher at Edison.
Students were taking more than half of their short vacations to complete assignments from their teachers leaving little to no time to spend time with their families.“I started my homework on Black Friday, around the afternoon because I wanted to at least take a mental day off from school on Thanksgiving. I finished all my assignments Sunday night,” Gardener said.
Homework assignments are only a small part of students’ responsibilities. “I’m a junior so I was just worried about how fast time passes, I was mainly thinking about SAT’s and my internship,” said Sarah Bisram, a junior at Edison.
“Seniors have a lot of responsibilities younger classmen don’t necessarily have. So they have a lot of deadlines they have to meet and time management is an ongoing skill,”said Maria Baker.
With the Christmas season upon us, students aren’t going to be able to get into the spirit if teachers don’t ease up on the homework assignments.