When I was in 3rd grade I used to have a ton of missing work to the point where at the end of the year I couldn't go to 4th grade until I finished most of my missing assignments. The reason I had all of these missing assignments was yeah I didn't really want to do them. But I also was assigned up to 4 or 5 homework assignments per day which would take around 3 hours to complete. I however didn't have 3 hours to complete assignments because I was busy with sports. When practice was over at 5 I had to do chores until 5:30 to 6 then I had to eat supper and then I finally had 2 hours to do my homework but usually only did 1 hour of it because I needed at least some free time to myself. The point is, there is usually way too much homework and too little time to complete any of it. I'm going to be talking about how homework ties into sports, activities, free time, and sleep.

Firstly is sports, most of us are in sports after school and have a reason to do them so we can't just not do them because we have a lot of homework. Some people will argue that if sports leave little time for homework or make homework harder, then just don't do them. But that statement isn't really fair because people like sports and can't quit something they love just for homework. Other people are pressured to do sports or forced by their parents so it isn't even their fault that they are in sports. For the people that do sports know it is a struggle for assignments. You have practice right after school until 5 or 6 and then most people have other things that need to get done after that or just want a little free time and homework gets in the way of that when there is a lot of it. If you are in sports you also have games or tournaments, and those can last anywhere from 2 to 3 hours or more and if it is an away game you won't get back home till around 9 typically leaving little time for homework.

Second, I will talk about activities. A lot of us have activities that we do after school. These activities could be work, band or choir, chores, piano lessons, drivers ed, etc. I can make a safe bet that almost everyone reading this has some sort of activity after school, and you would know how homework ties in and makes your life more stressful when there is too much of it that you have to do after an activity. This goes especially if you are in an activity and sports, because then the only way for you to complete your homework is to stay up late and get no sleep. Not to mention when you have all this going on and then you finally get freetime you have to spend most if not all of it completing homework assignments that typically don't even matter in the future.

This brings me to my next topic, free time. We have limited free time as it is, even if you don't do any sports free time is still just a small chunk of your day and homework makes that chunk even smaller. There should not be a reason to have homework in general because you spend 7 hours at school anyways, just to spend another 2 at home during your own time to do homework. A lot of people have busy lives like I have talked about before, so when they finally get everything done including homework it is probably 8 to 10 at night. This is not ideal because then they end up staying up later so they can use some of their very small bit of free time and then end up going to sleep late.

That leads me to my final topic, sleep. Homework plays a very big role in sleep. According to the Douglass research center, Homework may affect a child’s sleep in three ways. First, the time it takes to finish an assignment may infringe on time that should be used for sleeping. Second, work done too close to bedtime may leave a child too stimulated to fall asleep easily. Finally, if homework is done on or near a child’s bed, the child may associate that area with working or stress and not be able to fall asleep easily there. Students who are caught up in a lot of sports or activities end up getting home late already and just want to go to bed, but they can't. Because they still have an extra hour of homework, they end up staying up later and not getting to bed at a reasonable time. This causes students to get an unhealthy amount of sleep which can be devastating for student athletes. Getting this little sleep causes you to be tired at school and get even less work done because you don't have the energy to do it.

So in summary I have talked about how homework leaves little time for free time and rest. It also makes you have to spend less time on sports and activities because it gets in the way of them. Remember I have been struggling with this for awhile, as I said before I had so many missing assignments when I was little. The main thing that has changed now is that I have a study hall which I highly recommend to take for high schoolers. The other thing that changed is that the work got a lot harder so it evens out in all. Homework has been a thing for many years but as technology advances you can learn anything you would from homework on your device. Yet still, there is too much homework to complete and too little time for it.