Sleep..

High school students are sleep deprived, therefore less homework should be assigned to them. Agree or Disagree?

It's quite hard to choose a side for this question... I could definitely use more sleep and less homework... On one hand, I want to blame my lack of sleep on homework; but I also know that homework is essential for student success, especially high school students. So I think there are two sides to this issue.  

One reason homework is good, is that teenagers are generally easily distracted and they are not disciplined enough to do all the studying by themselves if no homework was assigned. Therefore, students need enough homework to understand and learn the lessons and prepare for tests. For instance, if I didn't receive all that load of math homework to practice, I would have probably failed my tests. Furthermore, homework is not the only factor that results in sleep deprivation in students. As mentioned, we students are very distracted (by things such as social media, Internet, TV, etc.) and sometimes a simple task takes longer than it should to complete because we don’t yet have the time management skills. Hence, we end up not finishing our homework on time and pulling an all-nighter.

While I believe that homework is very beneficial, I think that maybe some areas of daily homework should be lessened. For instance, sometimes certain assignments and projects are too time consuming and have unnecessary aspects that don’t really relate to the topic being studied in class; such as making the assignment “pretty” or doing a project on something that does not contribute to the understanding of important topics. For example, sometimes I finish the most important part of the project, which is research and application, but spend a vast amount of time on making a poster. In this case, I feel that part of the project could be cut as students would have a chance of just focusing on the application and purpose of the project itself and not the unnecessary time consuming parts. In addition, another problem is the distribution of the homework load and not necessarily the amount. Often teachers assign a large load of homework at once. Personally, I have that one week (each month) when everything is due from all my four courses which then of course leaves me sleep deprived.

It's especially important for youth to get enough sleep. So I think if teachers try to distribute the load of homework as evenly as possible and negotiate deadlines with students, then students would not be sleep deprived (or not as much) and they would still receive the amount of homework needed for success.