How much is too much homework?

As I sit here writing this article, I write it with the knowledge that I’m about to fall asleep and that I still need to finish a project, revise an essay on “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” complete a Pre-Calculus assignment, study Advanced Placement (AP) Biology notes, write an article review for AP U.S. History and practice the violin.Believe me, before I entered junior year I was warned of its cruelty; Spanish teacher Kelly Bates even tells the sophomores in her classes that junior year is “un año feo,” or, “an ugly year.” What an ugly year it has been. It’s not the utterly involved concepts that have to be grasped when taking three AP classes, it’s the amount of homework we receive every night that leaves us venting on Facebook.It has come to the point where homework consumes a majority of our nights. It’s not rare for Samo students to get home late, I get home at 8 p.m. on some nights and some people get home later. I usually go to sleep on nights like this at 3 a.m. and wake up at 6 a.m. With the amount of homework I have and the amount of time I have to do it, I barely have any time to do a thorough job. One might argue that we are the ones who decide to put this work load upon ourselves and that we should know better, but how can we not sign up to do all these activities when we are constantly pushed to take these classes and extracurriculars, which, might I add, are school-sponsored.I find myself constantly rushing to finish my homework without really understanding the curriculum. If homework is supposed to solidify what we learned that day in class, how are we supposed to do that when we just rush through it? When people pull an all-nighter, many end up in bad moods and half asleep the next day at school, how can we learn like this? The answer is, we can’t, and as a student who wants to do the best work she can, I usually end up with work subpar to what I am capable of.Fran Kuperberg (’14), who is taking three AP classes, said she wants the amount of homework given out to students to decrease.“I have to stay up late finishing my homework and I get so tired and therefore less focused,” Kuperberg said. “The act of doing homework becomes less effective.”Some argue that APs should be taken with the consideration that they will require a lot of work.I’m not saying that homework is bad; its overall purpose makes sense, but what doesn’t make sense is having unnecessary work that ultimately doesn’t help in the long run. Even kids with straight A’s should do homework because it strengthens what is learned in class, but if homework does not help us prepare for a test or if it includes information that we don’t need to know, then I don’t see the importance of doing it.According to the Parent Institute, there are four types of homework: practice, preparation, extension and creative homework. Practice homework helps a student memorize material. Preparation homework prepares a student for an exam. Extension homework requires a student to broaden their range of thought when doing their homework. Creative homework includes projects and artistic work. Most of the homework we get is practice homework, but if we were given more extension homework, our minds would be more used to the complex material we see on tests and we would still show our teachers that we understand the concepts. And, it wouldn’t be considered busy work.I am the kind of person who likes to read about the life and death of Alexander Hamilton, but I don’t take time to think about what I’m reading in my history textbook anymore, instead I just skim through whatever I have to read. All I ask is that teachers become aware of when another teacher is holding a test. The school could assign each subject a testing day. For example, students could take history tests on Thursday and  math tests on Friday. According to Parent Teacher Student Association (PTSA) President Lisa Balfus, there will be a meeting in January to discuss the amount of homework students receive and the possibility of lowering it. I like to look at it this way, if the PTSA wants to lower the amount of homework students get, then we know there is an issue.nmunasinghe@thesamohi