Opinion: Homework load forces high schoolers to choose: grades or health?

Editor’s Note: This article was written for Mosaic Vision, an independent journalism training program for high school students who report and photograph stories under the guidance of professional journalists.

I worry a lot about homework, more than anyone should.

As soon as I return home from school, I launch into my math homework. I get stuck on a problem and quickly switch to reading my environmental science textbook for a quiz tomorrow. I go back to my precalculus worksheet, watch a video walkthrough and solve the rest of it — but it is already 7 p.m.

Instead of eating dinner with my family, I am hunched over my laptop screen watching Heimler’s History review online videos for my Advanced Placement U.S. History test, which I did not have time to do earlier because I was too focused on completing homework for the same class.

When all my homework is done, it is 10 p.m., and I still have to shower, catch up with my parents, clean up my room, finish writing and editing articles, make a post for the next photography club meeting and if I am lucky, relax. I end up falling asleep at midnight, sometimes after midnight. However, I need to wake up at 7 in the morning, making it difficult to get adequate sleep.

For most of this school year, I ranged from five to seven hours of sleep on most nights and did not get time to relax.

Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, has studied academic stress for decades. She co-founded Challenge Success, a nonprofit that aims to elevate students’ voices and increase well-being and engagement with learning.

With other members of Challenge Success, Pope compiled a research project called “Quality Over Quantity: Elements of Effective Homework.” They found that high schoolers who averaged over three hours of homework lost 30 minutes of sleep.

Thirty minutes, from my experience, seems a bit low. I have friends who often pull all-nighters because of excess assignments.

Pope said college stress plays a major factor in pressure to perform well in school because students feel that if they get bad grades, they won’t get into a good college — a prevalent fear among my classmates, myself included.

Massive amounts of homework create a constant battle of prioritizing my grades versus my health. I can’t go out for a walk or work out because I have a project to finish. I stress-eat more, often eating junk food in my kitchen. I get less sleep because I spend more time doing homework.

For her doctoral dissertation, Pope followed five high school students in the Bay Area for a year. This school and its kids had a good academic reputation, but there was a dark side to this.

“I found a lot of stress, a lot of homework. One of the kids had an ulcer from stress, one was constantly cheating,” Pope said. “People were struggling to juggle extracurriculars, they weren’t sleeping.”

Many kids feel pressured to take multiple honors or AP courses, which contain accelerated paths and often more homework. Even “regular” classes give large amounts of homework, and if people do not balance their schedules with their extracurriculars, sports and jobs, they end up overloaded, Pope said.

It is important to study and learn, but if the stress that comes with it erodes our health, is it worth it?

Kids deserve to be kids. We should not be prioritizing our grades over our mental health, our family, or our friends, and yet college culture encourages us to do this. We feel like we could always be doing more, scoring higher, starting more non-profits, just to get a better chance at getting admitted.

Teachers are not the ones creating the college pressure, but many do fuel it by factoring homework into their students’ grades.