Do Homework Affect a Student's Personal Life?

In Korea International School Jeju Campus, many students have complained about homework.

The amount of homework that one has could possibly affect their private life. As homework are usually individual work, it will lead to one isolating themselves to finish their work in time and miss out on some quality time hanging out with friends or just resting.

“A student’s purpose is to procrastinate.” KISJ junior, Peter Kang said. He is one of the finest students at this school and showed his belief in why homework seems to take so long.

He believes that “1~3 hours” is the usual amount of time it takes for him to finish his homework each day. He likes to use his spare time studying for tests, doing personal research, and occasionally hanging out with his friends.

Peter did find the amount of homework to be lengthy; however, he finds the purpose of homework to be worthy of the time he spends each day.

“Homework is essential in helping me understand the material more and with more depth.” Peter finds homework to be reasonable considering that no extra study must be done in order to get a good grade or understand school content.

While Peter did agree that the amount of homework is lengthy and can be considered as “invading personal time”, he still found the time spent on homework to be acceptable.

Similarly, another junior, Lauren found herself struggling to separate her personal time from schoolwork.

“I think it invades my personal life, but I also think at the same time I really need that.”

She gave an unexpected response when she reasoned that she wants the amount of homework to invade her personal time as 11th grade “requires a lot of skills”.

She argued that it is right for her to be spending a lot of time on schoolwork, especially homework because it is her junior year. Moreover, junior year can be viewed as the most important year of high school because 11th grade is the last year for students to explore their interests and improve their GPA to get ready for college applications.

However, she did find her own solution in a way as she said that she has “dorm friends who also take AP Chemistry, so we help each other”.

Lauren hangs out with her friends who have overlapping classes as her, which is the method that a great deal of KISJ students are using currently as it is deemed an effective way for students to enjoy while fulfilling their academic needs.

To gain a faculty view of how homework are affecting student lives, KISJ’s AP Psychology/Macroeconomics teacher, Mr. Zottoli has kindly offered his opinion.

“I think that it’s different for a kid, I think that it’s an impossible question to answer in a general format. Some students in this school still struggle with English, so reading a textbook chapter can be really hard and that might take them longer.”

He acknowledged that in this school, the English level varies between students, which creates a time gap between students who are fluent with English finishing their homework and students who are still learning English finishing their homework. He deliberately emphasized that AP homework would be relatively hard for any student in this school as it is a “college-level course”.

But he has also mentioned that some students procrastinate a lot, which is the reason why an hour of homework becomes 3 hours of homework, and studying past midnight becomes normal for them.

A word of advice he’d like to give to these students is “students should be more efficient at getting their work done in a timely manner so they can enjoy their free time”

The reason why homework is such a big topic in school is that it is the most direct, academic workload that can affect your personal life. It is work that you take home and it technically is counted as exterior work done outside of school.

High school is the period of time in our life where we have to prepare for college, while academics are important to go to a good college, a unique personality that attracts people can also be found just as important as good academics.

Through students interviews, it is safe to say that homework won’t affect your personal life as long as you are efficient while working on your academics, and as Mr. Zottoli likes to say “work smart not hard.”

This article can be informative to KISJ students as it is asking students' opinions of whether the amount of homework load that the school gives to achieve its American education is reasonable. Through this article, students can think about the purpose of homework and hopefully make a personal analysis of their homework to find the reason why they endure so much homework compared to other schools. Also, faculty members of KISJ can think about the effect they have on the students as they hand out homework at the end of each class. Ultimately, this article has been written in hopes that students can build a personal connection with the topic and bring attention to why students sometimes struggle with the immense amount of homework in this school.