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Isabella Estrada

Mrs. Storer

English 3 Honors Block 4

28 October 2019

The Suffocating Pile

Since the 1950s, homework has been engraved in the life of the average student.

Students, with a seven to eight class schedule, are given an average of one to two hours of

homework per class per night. Countless hours are spent completing these assignments: after

school, on weekends, on vacations, and even summer break. With the aggressive time and effort

that must be put into the assignments, students often resort to copying the answers of other

students or those posted online. Teachers and faculty of schools all around the world will say that

idea is crucial to reinforce ideas learned in class and develop good study habits. However, in the

modern-day and age, with all these negative effects that homework has on the life of a student

already attending school for eight hours a day, homework is not as vital as it once was.

In middle school, I attended a Catholic school in which I had seven classes every single

day. Therefore, I had seven homework assignments every night that I had to complete by the

next day. I remember vividly the first week of eighth grade to be one of the most traumatizing

weeks of my life. The first thing we learned about was what we needed to do to go to a Catholic

high school. They stressed straight A’s, extracurricular activities, church involvement, and

student leadership. So, I decided to do all of these things. I would arrive at school at six in the

morning, go to school from eight to three in the afternoon, stay after school for volleyball

practice until five-thirty in the afternoon, arrive at home at six, stay up until two in the morning
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trying to complete all my homework assignments, then wake up at four-thirty the morning and

do this day all over again. This went on for the entire school year. The timeline may not seem

believable, but it was my actual routine for about a year of my life. I took seven classes at my

school and all the teachers assigned about an hour of homework each night. On top of this each

week we received a History project, a Science lab write-up, and an English journal assignment in

which we had to annotate the entire chapter from the book assigned. As assumed, this amount of

homework significantly affected my physical and mental health. I had several mental

breakdowns in the middle of the night behind my computer screen. I also was sick during my

eighth-grade year for several months, I started to lose my hair, I gained a lot of weight, I had

several migraines, and suffered from many fainting spells. All of this was caused because of the

amount of homework I had and that I was told my entire life that I needed to complete all of my

assignments.

My daily routine described above is not foreign to young girls and boys around the world.

They will go to extremes to complete the work given to them even at the expense of their

physical and mental health. Homework, which was designed to try and help students, has

become one of the biggest areas of anxiety, stress, and harm in their life. Even though it has

some positive effects, the cons out way the pros and therefore, it should not be distributed

anymore.