On weekends most kids participate in activities that have nothing to do with homework or school! However, teachers often give more homework on the weekend than they do during the week. Many young people simply don’t have time for fun anymore! During the week many kids have other commitments to fulfill, and after that they have to do homework. Then, on the weekends when there is free time, they have to complete longer assignments instead of joining in on recreational activities.
On weekdays most kids are tired of school even before they get to their homework. Some kids have trouble getting there work done during the week as it is, and then they want to have fun on the weekends, but they have to catch up on work they have missed. Students sit in school for almost six hours a day, four days a week and five hours on Wednesdays. That is a total of almost thirty hours a week. Then, they go home on Friday afternoon, and they want to have fun and be kids, but there are two to three more hours of homework waiting to be done at home! During the weekends many kids play on a sports team, have games, and then end up doing homework late on Sunday night. As a result, they are practically falling asleep in school on Monday!
Have any kids noticed that a lot of teachers tend to give more homework on weekends, figuring that kids will have more time to do it on Saturday and Sunday? For example, one of my teachers always assigns long study guides to be completed over the weekend when I really have less time than I do during the week. Then I end up having to work on the study guide when the rest of my family is doing something entertaining.
Furthermore, in the winter there are a lot of germs running around, and many of the kids get sick for days at a time. This leads to a back up in work, and then the missed homework is dumped onto the weekend when there is already a homework load for the days that the kids have not been sick. For example, I was sick for a week, and right now I am being forced to catch up on the weekend when I should really be resting and making sure I am not sick anymore. The homework load on weekends most likely will result in work that is not done as well as it could be because kids who want to relax rush through their homework to do so.
Maybe teachers could try not to assign projects that can only be done over the weekend because there is other homework in the week or they could at least try to give twenty minutes or less, which still adds up to over an hour and thirty minutes total in homework. Would it be too much to ask to have one weekend free of homework a month for kids to be kids? Maybe if kids could relax and rest more on the weekends instead of doing two hours of homework, there would be more healthy children and fewer germs to spread around. If kids are spending every spare second to do homework, what’s even the point of having a weekend?
~ Lindsey Bailey