One of the most common causes of adolescent stress is homework and grades. Students spend around 1,080 hours in school and 4-5 hours a week on homework. Adding all that together, students will spend 10-11 hours in school or working on assignments. That is almost half a day.

Teachers should not assign homework over the weekend. Students not being assigned homework over the weekend would allow students to recover from a long week of school. It would allow them to detach themselves from school for the weekend fully.

Weekends are crucial for recovering from a long week of school. First, weekends allow students to catch up on the sleep they miss during the week. According to the National Library of Medicine, sleep deprivation can slow reaction time and reduce judgment. Secondly, weekends can encourage students to engage in activities they do not often engage in. Any physical activity will pump a person’s brain with endorphins that improve their mental state.

A survey run by Challenge Success found that students had an average of 2.7 hours of homework on the weekends. Meanwhile, they had an average of 3 hours on the weekdays. The nearly 3 hours of work does not allow students to detach themselves from school.

The weekends prevent students from experiencing burnout during the school year. According to Mayo Clinic, some causes of burnout among employers are lack of control and long hours. Students cannot decide when to take breaks because they have no control over their schedule.

They are in school seven hours a day and usually spend three hours a night on homework. Students are already at high risk of burnout during the school week, and assigning homework on the weekend increases the risk.
If students burn out, they could temporarily ruin their mental and emotional state. Symptoms of burnout include depression, feeling sad, angry, and not caring. These feelings are harmful to students’ personal lives, but they could also affect their academic lives.

For the reason above, teachers not assigning homework over the weekends would benefit students’ academic and social lives.

Many students find homework overwhelming and blame it on outside factors. Sometimes, they procrastinate, get distracted, or just look at the work and get scared by the workload. Teachers worked hard to find the right workload for the 45-minute limit of homework that is typically required for class. You get homework for all four classes, which would be only three hours of work. Instead of complaining and trying to reduce workloads, a better solution would be for students to finish the work on the day it is given.

As a school, we have gone through many variations of schedules; however, all our classes average 1 hour and 15 minutes. The only other option is to stay on pace with your homework so you don’t get overwhelmed.

Homework alone can build up enough stress to cause health issues. Healthline supports that 70% of students said they were often stressed with schoolwork, and 56% said it was the main reason for their stress. Some students who have learning disabilities who are afraid to approach teachers build up more and more homework, causing more and more stress.

The only thing students can do to combat this is to do it the day it is assigned before other homework from other days builds up and pressures you to rush it. Rushed homework also isn’t of high quality and might cause letters to be written back to your parents. This, in turn, leads to a reinforcing loop of stress, buildup of homework, and disappointment.

Doing it the day it is given will allow you to have time to ask teachers questions beforehand. Asking questions to prepare for a class can be very helpful. However, having too much work due the next day may cause you to overlook and forget what the problem was. Rushing through work also doesn’t always yield the same results as if I did them with time and thoroughness. Having to go through messy notes repeatedly because you were rushed takes more time and causes more work to pile up.

Doing this meaningless work might lead to a sense of accomplishment, but in reality, you have done nothing. You might think you deserve a break and start doom-scrolling on your phone, and more time will go down the drain. Peter Ostrem’s article about focus supports that once you start scrolling, it gets harder to stop. You are wasting more and more time.

Peter Lipinsky argues that students think the weekend should be a time to relax, causing this procrastination. However, if that is so, homework wouldn’t be given on Thursday or Friday. This will cause students to lag and take even more effort to stay on pace.

The best solution to avoid mental health issues is to do it the day it is given. Even if you forget some things, you will have two days to catch up and guarantee high-quality work.