Every night, students come home with hours of homework. Whether they have extracurriculars, jobs, or family responsibilities, their evenings are stretched thin while they try to balance all activities.
What might have been a few hours of downtime for these students turns into piles of work. The pressure to keep up can be overwhelming, and opinions on whether or not homework is beneficial or excessive vary widely among students and teachers.
In the English and Social Studies department, Mead teachers share that they often assign book reading for homework. They also include insight on AP classes, as the expectation for those is more homework per night, including the general reading.
In the Science department, teachers expressed that they assign homework very rarely, except for unfinished work. While with AP classes, again a little more, students must go through the content that wasn’t covered in class.
The Word Language department shared the same value of not giving a lot of homework. As Spanish teacher Ms. Harris stated, “I actually stopped doing Spanish homework because everyone would cheat and use Google Translate because nobody was able to help them.”
Unlike the Science and World Language department, the math workload is very different. Most math teachers assign a good amount of homework problems each night, and students adding that math is one class they receive the most homework.
The Stanford Report did a research project on the benefits of homework, and found that “too much homework” can cause greater stress, reductions in health, and less time for family, friends, and extracurriculars in students’ lives.
The study proved that less than 1% of students said homework was not a stressor. It also showed that homework causes sleep deprivation and that students were likely to drop extracurricular activities and time with friends and family in exchange for more time on their homework assignments. Mead teachers did mention keeping this in mind while assigning homework, though the workload still varies per subject.
A wide variety of students at Mead High School were interviewed, and the opinions differed significantly. Some students said they rarely have any homework, while others could barely juggle homework with extracurriculars and, most importantly, sleep.
Bella Walmsely-Dozier (‘29) states, “It takes about 30 minutes to an hour after school to do my work, and then I do my after-school activity.” As an underclassman, Walmsely-Dozier agrees she has found a balance between schoolwork and outside activities.
On the other hand, Ryleigh Gillette (‘27) admitted, “I just don’t sleep.” This highlights how the workload often increases with grade level, leaving some students drained and overwhelmed while others are able to find time for their activities outside of school.
When asked which classes give the most homework, many students pointed to AP and collegiate-level courses. Kaylee Morley (‘26) explained her most homework heavy class is her “English composition class—it’s a front range college class.”
Homework at Mead looks different for everyone, as it can be assumed this is true for all schools. Some students can manage their assignments with ease, while others are missing out on some needed sleep or family time.
Teachers acknowledged these differences too, noting that homework isn’t made to overwhelm the students but to reinforce the idea. Together, both student and teacher perspectives show that the impact on homework is a mix between personal circumstances, course load, and grade level.
