Homework is a terrible task that keeps students up into the late hours of the night. It often causes parents to yell, “Go to bed!” as students desperately try to complete it before exhaustion claims their weary bodies and minds. There is no student in the world that enjoys homework, and it is always the worst part of his or her day. The purpose of homework is to reinforce material learned in school. However, it rarely fulfills this purpose because of all the problems it causes. Homework has an overall negative influence on students because it makes school have negative connotations, it causes massive stress and health issues, and it is seldom effective at achieving its purpose.
When students simply hear the word homework it is automatically linked with school. You cannot have one without the other. Since most students hate homework, they will, as a result, begin to hate school. This can happen from an early age, which can be devastating. If a student has hatred of school it will certainly lead to problems later on in life. This negative relationship could result in a student dropping out of school, all because of homework. It does not matter if the student is intelligent or not. Giving a smart student homework on something that they already have learned is useless. Giving homework to a student who does not know how to do the assignment results in them either giving up, or doing it incorrectly, and feeling ashamed the next day. If teachers could work at an efficient rate, and get everything done in class, there would be no need for homework. Homework can extinguish a young child’s curiosity for learning. If homework were eliminated students would enjoy school, and get to spend the other limited hours of the day doing different activities.
When a student arrives home from school the last thing that they want to do is their homework, and yet it is always looming the back of their minds. It is nearly impossible to get off a student’s mind, especially with their parents constantly nagging them about it all day. Students have next to no free time. Between school, eating, and sleeping there is little time for anything besides homework. Usually sleeping will be sacrificed in order to complete ridiculous amounts of unnecessary and repetitive work. Lack of sleep will only lead to less effectiveness in school, and all the more risk of getting sick, which leads to missed school days. Next to suffer is time for nutrition. Students may miss breakfast in order to get to school early and do homework, or they could spend lunch doing homework they were too tired to complete. Homework also causes stressful relationships between parents and their children. No one likes to nag someone, and no one likes to listen to nagging. Homework can cause fights between parents and children, which makes it all the more of a stressful activity. If a student is physically or mentally unhealthy they cannot do well in school. If homework is the cause of this unhealthiness, it is obvious that it needs to be eliminated. Homework causes mental and physical issues and, it is not what it was intended to be.
Homework is intended to help students not harm them, but all it does is cause harm. Teachers would argue that doing homework helps boost the grades of their students, but that is just giving students points for doing the teacher’s job. Once a student completes their homework there is no urge to learn further. Who would want to learn more after doing three hours of homework late at night? All students are focused on is getting their work done and going to sleep. Teachers would also say that doing homework involves applying techniques learned in class, and this will strengthen a student’s knowledge. On the contrary, the more a student does a certain type of assignment, the more they will begin to become bored of it and dislike it. That student will only perform well on that one test or quiz and then simply forget the information. Material that is freely learned or researched will be easily remembered, but material that is forced into a student’s brain will push itself out as soon as it can.
The negative effects of homework far outweigh and out number the trivial positive effects. It makes students associate school with a terrible chore. It also makes parents constantly annoy their children to do their homework until it becomes too late, and that turns into telling them to get some sleep. Homework ruins the confidence of students, and it is not what teachers perceive it to be. Homework only makes students’ brains into sponges that absorb information, not knowledge, and squeeze it out onto a test paper, after which it never returns.
1 comment:
Mike:
• Wow, awesome intro. You are aggressive right off the bat, attacking the issue with fervor. Really like this. One of the few intros that was good that didn’t start with a quote. Great lead in to your thesis too.
• Ouch. “If teachers could….” Good line though. I like your argument in the first paragraph. The idea of a negative connotation leading students to dismiss school as well as homework. Don’t think it is your strongest, and I therefore would have probably put it in the middle of the paper, but it’s a unique angle.
• Long 2nd body paragraph. I wonder if you could break it up a little bit?
• I know you are trying to have a good transition sentence, but it comes across as a little bland.
• A bit of a logical fallacy when you say who would want to do more work after they’ve done 3 hours of homework. If they’ve already done their work, why would they be doing more?
o That could have worked if you went the “intellectual curiosity angle”
• You make the intellectually curious connection at the end of the paragraph, but I think it is too late to link to the beginning. The reader has lost that topic already.
• Love the ending of the paper! Mike, you did a great job with this. You have a couple of minor grammatical mistakes throughout, but nothing too distracting. For your next essay pay attention to why you are putting your body paragraphs in a certain manner. You want to start off strong, just like your intro, then usually have your weaker stuff in the middle a bit, and close strong again. Something to think about. Great job though!
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