To the Editor:

Don’t  you hate homework? Is there another reason than because you just don’t feel like doing it? If you think about it, there may be ways homework is completely ruining your life and you could easily live without it.

Some schools have realized what homework is actually doing to kids. Those schools have been lowering the amount of suffering their students are enduring by limiting the amount of homework each student receives.

Noah Lee, a student from Pleasanton Unified School District in California says, “I don’t have so much homework that I can’t do the things I love.”

I remember that, in my elementary school, we used to never get homework on Fridays. For me at least, that freed up some time to do the things I like to do, one of them not being homework. After all, every kid needs some leisure time to deal with all the stress from school.

Kids shouldn’t even be put under so much stress that they need leisure time to deal with it just because of school, and, most importantly, homework. Students in Pleasanton only get about 50 minutes of homework and they say it works for them.

How many times have you not done something you want to do because of your homework? On multiple occasions, I have been forced to skip activities that I like to do because of my homework.

Homework interferes with students’ personal activities, and intrudes on and even ruins family relationships. In 1981, kids, on average, got 144 minutes of homework and, over the past 35 years, that number has increased. Now, kids get more homework than ever before. Can you believe that?  All that time wasted on your lousy homework.

The weirdest part about all this homework is that some kids don’t even do their homework. Teachers are giving out so much homework that kids don’t even do it. Studies have shown that about 10 percent of kids don’t do their homework. Imagine, those kids think homework is so useless that they don’t even feel the need to actually do their homework. Doesn’t that send  a message to the teachers that kids don’t need homework? One would think so, but instead teachers just keep piling on more to the heap of useless junk that we call homework.

Of course, some will say that homework is good practice that all kids need, but they are wrong. Homework doesn’t actually have any effect on academic achievement.

Harris Cooper, a homework expert, conducted an experiment that proved that homework does indeed have no effect on a student’s academic achievement. Surprising right? We kids endure all the suffering that comes with the horror to humanity known as homework for absolutely nothing. To be honest, for me it sucks to hear you have been wasting time that could have been used better.

Homework is a true monstrosity to all children and serves no point at all. It is a waste of everyone’s, including teacher’s, time. Such a monstrosity to mankind must be eradicated immediately.

Amol Kumar

Farnsworth Middle School