Project 3 - argumentative essay- Revised final PDF

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Argumentative Essay about homework not being beneficial to secondary students...

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Nathan Johnson English 1010 November 5, 2021

IS SCHOOL HOMEWORK BENEFICIAL TO STUDENTS? American writer Marilyn Vos Savant once said, “Teens think listening to music helps them concentrate. It doesn’t. It relieves them of the boredom that concentration on homework induces.” For generations, assignments such as math word problems, lengthy research reports, and diagramming sentences have been debated.

In the early 1900s, progressive education

theorists described homework’s negative impact on children’s physical and mental health, leading California to ban reading for students under 15 years old. However, public opinion swayed in favor of homework in the 1950s due to concerns about keeping up with the Soviet Union’s technological advances (Tim Walker). While homework may be prevalent in today’s classroom, homework is not beneficial to students. A young child’s education is not strengthened by doing homework. A recent study shows that fourth-grade students who did no homework got roughly the same score on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math exam as those who did 30 minutes of homework a night and those who did 45 minutes or more of homework a night did worse ( Alfie Kohn). When you spend much time doing homework on a subject that you don’t care about too much, you tend to skip through parts of it just to get done with it faster. Finally, some proponents of homework say that only half of the information they teach remains in their students’ minds. Therefore, they think that students should do homework when they get home to learn the entire lesson. However, I do not see it this way. When students get home with many distractions like dinner and family activities, it makes it even harder to concentrate on their schoolwork, much less retain it. While younger students may be eager to learn, especially when the homework is coloring pages, they still need time to decompress after a long day at school.

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Nathan Johnson English 1010 November 5, 2021

In addition, too much homework can negatively affect the mental and physical health of children. Elementary-age kids are still growing and need more sleep and healthy lifestyles. Not getting enough sleep could lead to health problems such as headaches and a lowered immune system. A schoolroom is full of germs, and students need to be their healthiest to combat illness. Excessive homework could also lead student to take unethical measures to get a good grade. Some 90% of middle school students and 67% of high school students admit to copying someone else’s homework (AdCouncil), and 43% of college students engage in “unauthorized collaboration” on out-of-class assignments (Jeffrey R. Young). Many students spend over 7 hours a day, five days a week at school, doing hard and confusing work, and when they get home, many teachers expect them to put in another 2 to 3 hours of work. Maybe some students are in sports after school, so they may not have enough time to finish their homework when they get back home. Some supporters of homework say that it helps the students by giving them better grades and more practice, lending them more opportunities to attend college. However, the opposite is true. Excessive homework can also make students hate school and leave them with no desire to go to college. Too much homework doesn’t leave students time to be with their friends or pursue outside interests such as sports and spending time with their family. It adds stress to a student’s day, and homework benefits are outweighed by the harm it causes. Lastly, having homework is not fair to lower-income families. Forty-one percent of kids in the United States live in low-income families and are less likely to have access to the resources needed to complete homework, such as pens, paper, computers, internet access, a quiet workspace, and a parent at home to help (Heather Koball and Yang Jiang). Many of them can’t afford a tutor to help them after school. A study by the Hispanic Heritage Foundation found that 96.5% of students across the country said they needed to use the Internet for class assignments Page 2

Nathan Johnson English 1010 November 5, 2021

outside of school. The study found that nearly half of the students at Alvin Dunn Elementary in San Marcos, California, one of the schools researched during the study, were unable to complete their homework due to lack of access to the Internet or a computer, sometimes resulting in lower grades (Claire McLaughlin). In addition, not everyone has access to a cell phone with Internet access to do research. It got even worse when all schools went to online classes during the COVID pandemic. Some kids couldn’t join the classes because they didn’t have Internet, a computer, or even a place to study. Some people may say that lower-income families can use school resources or the library, but some schools do not have enough laptops to pass around to students who need them. Relying on schools to provide these resources adds extra stress to a situation. Also, some students may feel ashamed of having to borrow things such as computers and calculators and don’t want to ensure the safety of borrowed equipment. Having students do endless amounts of homework after school is not benefical to them or the school’s test scores. What started as a way to keep up with the Soviet Union, has continued well after the need for such competition. I understand what it’s like not to have homework. For nine years before starting college, I was homeschooled. A place where I was able to delve deep into a school subject or education topic and not have to endure hours of redundant worksheets to prove that I understood a lesson. If I didn’t fully understand a topic, I was taught to approach the topic differently the next school day - perhaps by watching a movie or going on a field trip. I was never made to feel less or different because I couldn’t grasp a subject, and I wasn’t forced to give up my free time at night.

Growing up, I learned that homework is unnecessary and not

beneficial if your teacher helps you find your passion for a particular topic.

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Nathan Johnson English 1010 November 5, 2021

WORKS CITED Alfie Kohn, “Does Homework Improve Learning?,” alfiekohn.org, 2006 AdCouncil, “Cheating Is a Personal Foul: Academic Cheating Background,” glass-castle.com (accessed Aug. 16, 2018) Claire McLaughlin, “The Homework Gap: The ‘Cruelest Part of the Digital Divide’,” neatoday.org, Apr. 20, 2016 Jeffrey R. Young, “High-Tech Cheating Abounds, and Professors Bear Some Blame,” chronicle.com, Mar. 28, 2010 Heather Koball and Yang Jiang, “Basic Facts about Low-Income Children,” nccp.org, Jan. 2018 Tim Walker, “The Great Homework Debate: What’s Getting Lost in the Hype,” neatoday.org, Sep. 23, 2015

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