Homework and Stress

Homework and Stress

Can it cause anxiety and is it necessary?

By Qile Wu and Hudson Howey, Class of 2024

Homework, a double-edged sword: It can be both a burden and a helping hand in our academic lives. It can be a building block to our success, or the hastener to our all-out panic. But how does it feel when it becomes too much for us to handle? And, is homework even necessary?

To answer these questions, we need to look at this problem in two different perspectives.

I think a fairly large portion of us can agree that we hate homework and it can cause annoyance. It takes away your freetime, when you can spend time with your friends and family. 

We labor for hours on end in school, so why must we continue our torment in the short span between school days? Many of us know—whether from reputable sources or TikTok— that homework was originally devised as a punishment. In the case you didn't complete the work you were assigned within class, you would do so on your own time or face a decline in your grades. Now however, that way is lost and we suffer daily from work fully intended for us to do at home, not originally made for school. 

On the other hand, homework is a helpful way that helps you to absorb the knowledge you have learned at school. Without doing your homework, you surely wouldn’t be able to do as well in your quiz or test.

While test and quiz grades might improve from homework, is it not an educator's job to teach the students in the rather generous amount of time allocated to this purpose? The answer might not surprise you, it’s yes. While homework is said to make up a mere 5-20 percent of your grade, it is shocking how much 20 percent counts for. It might also be interesting how the closer you are to the start of a quarter or the year itself the more a single bad homework grade can impact you and your grade.

Back to our first question, can homework cause anxiety? The answer depends on the amount of homework. It would definitely negatively affect you if you do too much homework, because if you do, it takes away your time to do other things like socializing and exercising, which is bad for your health.

The solution to this is that there should be a reasonable amount of work. A teacher assigns a reasonable amount of homework when you don’t work on the homework for more than 15 minutes per subject. It would be too much time if you spend more time than that.

In addition, homework can also be merciless when it comes to late completion. Imagine you forget a single two-point assignment, no problem right? It varies. But imagine you miss a week, four or five homework assignments per class. Now try doing those with any activities you do other than that. Or maybe you don't have time from the loss of a loved one. Does that excuse you from your homework? On occasion, imagine if you miss a lot of homework, and you do one part of it and then — like a hydra with a million heads — two more come in its stead.

All the above answers our first question, which is that homework can cause anxiety. But there is a second question: Is homework necessary at all?

Personally I think the need for homework is subjective. If you were to never do your classwork, would you be expected to go home and spend hours watching YouTube? Hopefully not. But if you did ALL your classwork perfectly I see no reason as to have more to do at home.

Like we said above, homework can help you better understand what you have learned in class. But what about the times when what you learned in class is easy? We all have that one teacher who is merciful and teaches in an easily understandable way, and in parallel many of us have the one without mercy. The one who thinks that absurd amounts of homework and classwork is the only way to a functional education. But back to the kinder one… that teacher will try to let you learn as much as possible in class instead of simply forcing you to learn on your own time. But this does make it seem like homework is less a necessity and more of a preference.

In conclusion, Let’s answer the question we have asked ourselves in the beginning: is homework necessary? Yes. Homework is needed, at least in some quantity. Homework is an important metric on how well we perform academically, and it is a large portion of our grade. Can homework cause anxiety? It depends on how much work it is. Though homework would be beneficial at the right amount; but can produce the opposite effect if the amount is too high or too low. 

Thanks for reading!