According to an article on The Atlantic written in 2019 the amount of homework kids are getting has doubled since the 1990’s. Kids our age are more stressed, getting less sleep and more overworked than ever before.
According to senior Madeline Voinov, she said she was receiving “3 or 4 hours a night of homework.” Voinov is an AP student and a first team North Jersey athlete. So it is safe to say that she has a very full plate and the amount of homework she is getting is affecting her physically and mentally.
Voinov stated that homework makes her feel “very drained and hard to concentrate,” when doing hours upon hours of homework. When asked about the most amount of time she’s spent on homework she exclaimed, “Once I got home at 7 pm and didn’t go to bed until 5:15 am.”
One possible reason this spike in homework has increased since the 1990’s could possibly be technology. Most assignments kids do nowadays are online and submitted that way as well. Teachers now have the ability to assign homework from out of the classroom and update assignments instantaneously by just the click of a button.
A Wayne teacher who wishes to remain anonymous believes that the increase in expectations and curriculum throughout the state and the country forces students to do more work at home.
Another teacher who also wishes to remain anonymous cited the increase of students forgoing doing the work in class while claiming they prefer to do it at home. “I often give time at the end of the class to work on homework problems. I state that I am there to help students work through any issues. Often, students will prefer to pack up and listen to music rather than to get ahead on their homework or to get extra help from me.”
On top of that through the app Remind teachers and students can now instantly message each other so if anything happens we are notified almost immediately. When questioned on whether or not she thought technology could be responsible for the rise of homework, Voinov responded with “Yeah it makes it a lot easier for teachers to assign stuff.” She also touched upon all of the different possible things that can be done through the internet and homework. She brought up how due to the internet existing the possibilities of unique assignments are practically endless such as virtual labs for science classes, and graphs and line charts for math. Teachers back in the 1990s could never imagine doing any of this. Now that technology has become so advanced and fine tuned, the specific assignments we can get for homework are infinite.
