Kids SHOULD NOT Get Homework

• Ella Quinlan, Grade 8
• Poetry
• 2014

The problem with homework is that we’ve just spent six whole hours sitting at our desks, doing no exercise and completing school work. We leave school and come home, looking for a break and a time to relax. We come home lumbering a large number of heavy textbooks in our school bags, sit down at a desk and start our homework which takes hours.
Homework isn’t useful to us. With all homework, most of us want to get it out of the way so we rush and barely think or we leave it to the last minute and don’t have time to complete it properly. Neither are helping our education, it’s a complete waste of time!
Plus, stress isn’t healthy. With homework, we experience stress on a daily basis. The stress of having so much and not having enough time and stress of not understanding/or finding it too hard to do the homework
Also with all the homework, we as kids aren’t getting the chance to live our lives and be teenagers. Instead we are spending our teen years at a desk slaving for hours and hours over our homework and not getting the chance to hang out with our friends and be social.
Health classes give lectures everyday about the lack of exercise children and teenagers get. But, the reason why we don’t exercise isn’t because it’s our choice. It’s because of the amount of homework that we receive and are expected to complete every day. We don’t have time to exercise, as homework takes priority.
Not only are the lectures about how we are getting no exercise, what about the lectures we get every day and night from our teachers and parents about going to bed. It is always the same, about going to bed early so that you won’t be tired and can focus. But, what teachers don’t get, is that the reason why are so tired is because of them. The reason why we are so exhausted that we can barely open our eyes to focus in class is their entire fault. All the homework that we get, chains us to our desks so that we work and work into the night. And then before we know it, the sun has risen. And our alarm goes off to wake us up, when in fact we never even went to sleep at all. And what our parents don’t realise is that it isn’t because we are not focusing in class, and aren’t organised or that we are dumb and stupid. But that every teen across Australia is doing the same thing.
All of this, because of the amount of homework kids are getting. How is this fair? These days teachers are expecting too much of us and need to back off. Let us teens live a healthy and happy life without the excessive amount of homework. It is not having a positive effect in fact it is having a complete opposite so what even is the point?