Wake up, go to school, do homework, go to sleep.  The seemingly endless cycle that high school students endure five days a week from September to June.   Almost everyday, students show up to school stressed and sleep deprived.  When students have too much homework, they “do it just to get it done” and do not absorb the information and do not learn anything, rendering homework useless. Too much homework can have a negative effect on students because it causes stress and limits their sleep. Teachers need to reduce homework by 50% because students need more time to sleep.  
   

Students sleep less due to excessive amounts of homework because homework affects them psychologically, physically, and emotionally.   Psychologically, homework creates anxiety, and anxiety makes it harder to sleep. Surveyed students’ “results showed that homework does cause stress and anxiety” (Refvik).  At night, students’ minds are on homework, and homework is on their minds.  They worry about whether or not  they did a good enough job on their homework and think about the next night’s homework. “Stress or anxiety can cause a serious night without sleep, as do a variety of other problems” (Sleep Disorders).  Not only does homework cause anxiety, it physically forces students to stay up later in order to finish their homework. They have math and English and science and social studies. “On average, high school students are assigned 3.5 hours of homework per weeknight, or more than 17 hours a week” (Klein).  This 3.5 hours of homework combined with extracurricular activities and dinner can cause students to stay up to eleven or later at night thus sleep depriving students who need between “9 and 9 ½ hour of sleep” (Sleep In Adolescents).  When students stay up late to finish their homework, they do not sleep enough hours thus negatively affecting their health.   Homework also impacts a student’s emotions.  It causes emotional stress which deprives them of sleep.  Mom says  “Do your homework”, dad says, “Do your homework”, and just like that a peaceful household explodes into a warzone.  This unrest in a household causes students stress which will disturb their sleep.  Everyone wants peace in their home, and reducing homework will allow for this causing less stress and therefore allowing for more sleep.  “A Stanford researcher found that students who spend too much time on homework experience more stress” (Levy).  The stress of doing excessive amounts of homework each night can cause a student to lose sleep.  Must the importance of sleep be argued?
   

A common belief among teachers and educators students struggle to complete their homework because they have poor time management and procrastinate.  This argument is true in some cases; however, “Many students do extracurriculars for a few hours after school and cannot start homework until after dinner (say 6:30 PM)” (Canapari).  Most students have extracurricular activities, and some may run for hours causing students to stay up late doing homework because they are not able to start working till late.  In addition, many students who take advanced classes have to spend a much larger amount time on homework each night.  “Each of his Advanced Placement classes had 1-2 hours of assigned homework per night and he was not routinely finishing homework until 11 PM or 12 AM”  (Canapari).  If a student takes 3 or more advanced placement classes that give these excessive amounts of homework, they could receive anywhere from 3 to 6 hours of homework per night causing them to be up late doing homework no matter what.  These excessive amounts of homework combined with extracurricular activities force sleep deprived students to stay up late and not receive their necessary 8.5-9 hours of sleep per night. 
   

Reducing the amount of homework given to students will allow them more time to sleep.

Students will relax psychologically and emotionally because they will have less anxiety and stress.  They will physically have more time to sleep because the duration of their nightly homework will largely decrease. 

Students will have more time for extracurricular activities, but most importantly, if they receive less homework, students can improve their sleep habits and their grades.