Teachers are giving too much homework with virtual learning. I have so much work that I’m currently writing this at 5:13 pm on a Saturday, and I have been working since around 2 pm. I am not even a third done. I have gotten three out of 10 assignments completed.

Every person I’ve asked has said that our teachers give too much homework. I have spent multiple weekends on homework, and even when I get home, I rarely ever have enough time to spend on myself or friends. I stay up past the time I have to go to bed around 10:00 pm to get a full nine hours of sleep. Recently, I had to stay up until almost midnight to finish a geometry assignment. I’m tired the next day and It’s difficult to keep up in my classes.

School is creating so much work that when added with my extracurricular activities, it does not allow me to have an even hour of free time to myself, and ruins my sleep schedule. I don’t hate it, rather I despise it to the point that I wish I could outsource the work to a friend to do it for me and just hope they do it well. 

Of course I wouldn’t actually do that, but I can tell you sometimes I think it would be better to break some sort of rules than to keep doing what we are doing. Some teachers may say that they give a reasonable amount of work for their class. It would be acceptable if we were in actual, physical, school. But we are not. We learn differently over monitors, and we can’t always keep up. It’s hard to find the work, digging through modules, assignments, discussions, notes, calendar, and others. Students have to do this for eight classes. You can see the problem.

Rather than giving tons of graded work, offer work that is mandatory, but the completion of it will give practice and will allow us to fully understand a subject before a test to determine our level of understanding. Make sure we know the material, not just grade us on the hour and thirty minutes to accurately understand an entirely new subject each day. Another idea is to just simply count the (untimed) test for the grade. The goal shouldn’t be to get good grades by an overabundance of work, but to fully understand the subject. Grading in itself is an irrelevant mark of progress by schools. 

In the end, teachers shouldn’t be giving a full day’s worth of work over the week. It’s unnecessary, unhealthy, and a horrible way to teach children these subjects. There are much better ways to do it, maybe none we can see right now, but they are there. For many students, Saturday is now the sixth school day of the week, and they need to have free time for myself to be stable as a student. This needs to stop, and it needs to stop soon. Or else school will be the only thing I do for weeks on end.