“I wish I could have at least 15 hours of sleep this week,” a freshman at IHS said. According to the National Sleep Foundation (NSF), teenagers need, on average, eight to 10 hours of sleep a day. If it is necessary for teens to get so much rest to maintain a healthy and functional lifestyle, what obstructs them from getting it?
Due to a heavy load of homework, adolescents such as myself lack sleep. We are victims of homework and its lethal doings. Sleep deprivation is common in this society, but students, of all people, need to sleep the most for a plethora of health-related reasons. Less sleep promotes depression, anxiety, and a tendency to dissipate concentration. If school is a place where students should feel comfortable learning, then why is it preventing them from actually being comfortable?
Many teenagers participate in extracurricular activities such as sports and clubs, decreasing their time to do homework. Students fret about doing all their homework rather than maintaining a healthy sleep cycle, which deteriorates a productive lifestyle; homework obstructs us from sleep—something necessary for survival. If teenagers are given an excessive amount of homework that takes away the time they have for other activities, shouldn’t their workload be reduced? “We just have too much homework and it forces us to stay up all night to finish it, or we get bad grades,” said a student. Our education seems to put homework before health, setting up an already stressful environment, so why worsen it by loading students’ backpacks?
Students report that they live in a postmodern schedule: wake up, go to school, come home, do homework, possibly sleep, and repeat. They have no time to enjoy their youth, and struggle to excel in school by keeping up with their schoolwork and homework—this builds stress.
When facing stress, our body prepares us to respond by increasing heart rate, blood pressure, and hormones. According to the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, “The result is the development of healthy stress response systems. However, if the stress response is extreme and long-lasting … the result can be damaged, weakened systems and brain architecture, with lifelong repercussions.”
Of course, everyone copes with stressful situations during their lifetime, but students nowadays must complete an arduous journey of finishing homework, which contributes to the reduction of sleep time, leading to stress. By sleeping less, our stress level increases, and prolonged sleep deprivation builds more stress, which, with time, destroys our mental and physical health. Nevertheless, students still make the decision to put homework before sleep.
Do students get too much homework, or is this the start of another era?