By: Megan Leboff
The Effects of Summer Homework
Everyone knows the feeling. You’re almost out of school, almost to freedom, but then it comes. The dreaded
summer homework. Soon your “time off” becomes filled with piles of books and essays.
Teachers say the summer homework is to keep your mind sharp over your time off, but is that really the case?
According to a Duke study on summer homework, there is little or no connection between summer homework and test scores, or long-term performance.
Some teachers could argue that summer homework keeps you from forgetting important lessons. However, if students forget the material quickly, the lesson was most likely skimmed over, and not taught well enough.
What many teachers don’t consider is whether or not they taught the material well enough. The danger of having summer homework is it could be done wrong by the student. If the student does the homework wrong, the student will have trouble later in the year.
Summer homework also steals time away from students being able to spend time with friends, which helps improve social skills. Social communication is one of the biggest parts of a student’s adult life. A skill way more important than things summer homework teaches, like reviewing how to graph, or what ancient Aztecs had for dinner.
More than one-third of adults in the United States are obese, doctors and scientists pushing for more people to get up and be active. Instead, summer homework does the exact opposite, keeping students inside, studying and writing essays.
Homework has been so common for so long, students have come to terms with it, and practically expect it. Summer’s main purpose was to give both teachers and students a break from the long exhausting hours they experience in school. While teachers get a break, students do not, giving them school practically all year round.
This pattern of continuous heavy work can make students dread going to school even more, and may even lead to them dropping out. Each year, over 1.2 million students drop out of high school in the United States alone, and a high-school dropout is unable to get 90% of jobs in America.
Not to mention, summer homework distracts students from having fun, and instead has them focus on finishing the assignment on time. The only thing students can think about is getting the assignment done on time. It takes the fun out of summer, even when the student isn’t currently working on it.
But hey, why be so negative? Let’s focus on the positive side of summer homework. It effectively takes time away from our summer, and it does a great job of stressing us out. And don’t worry about it being too hard, lots of summer homework is just pointless busywork anyway.
Summer homework is a waste of the precious time we get off, and in most cases does more harm than good. It
shows definite signs of taking a toll on students, and should no longer be tolerated.
