By Sarah Hines, Year 11,
Is homework really the best way to teach students? What are the merits and demerits of this form of teaching? These questions will all be debated in this article.
First of all, homework may clash with existing assignments, causing overload, and leading to burnout. This not only negatively affects the student’s health but it also causes bad learning; since the student overinvests in completing the homework, rather than learning the content. However, if the student manages to balance their work, a difficult endeavour, the homework can encourage high quality structured autonomous learning, which therefore develops positive habits that will be useful for future learning. Another main problem with homework overloads is that it unhealthily stresses students, because it provides a sense of helplessness towards completing their upcoming deadlines in time. This ends up affecting not only their health, but also their everyday moods and well-being; if a student is overly stressed, they may develop depressive tendencies, and lose opportunities to enjoy their daily life. Extensive homework may also result in the creation of negative habits as many students respond to this pressure by completing all-nighters. This not only disrupts their sleep cycle, but also alters their lifestyle, causing many students to take extra medication or energy drinks in an effort to keep up. There are also other students who work non-stop to meet all the deadlines, and therefore can not complete the activities they actually enjoy, or expand their talents (drawing, sports, others). I once knew a girl in my old school who limited herself to only 1 hour of badminton per week as otherwise she could not complete her tasks. This is a tragic consequence of homework overload, as it stopped someone from completing an activity which they were not only very passionate about, but also very talented at. Although those are some disadvantages, it is also true that having homework can motivate students to learn regularly, preparing them for upcoming tests. It also teaches students to learn by their lonesome, developing their critical thinking skills, and reducing their reliance on the teacher. Sadly, this can also have the opposite effect, leading to copying and the use of AI tools such as ChatGpt instead of personal learning. This obviously does not help their learning, in fact, it only digresses their critical thinking. Finally, it is also true that many students have difficulty learning at home due to bad work environments, which may lead to less fortunate students being unfairly punished. Again the opposite may also be very true as many students work much more productively at home. Either way homework creates big differences in learning, aiding some students over others, due to the students’ available time and space.
Clearly, even if homework does helps many students to learn, and may create good working habits, the majority of students struggle balancing their work, social life and their extra-curricular activities, which usually result in burn outs and/or the creation of bad habits.
