Ever since walking through the doors of North Atlanta High School back in August I have been pushed and encouraged to join clubs, participate in extra-curriculars, do physical activity, maintain a social life, get enough sleep and above all, keep my grades up. All of these important aspects to surviving high school have been pushed down the drain due to my excessive and ridiculous amounts of homework.

After sitting through four long classes and barely surviving the school day, the thought of completing my homework for the next day’s classes is unbearable. “Teachers don’t even seem to realize the large amounts of homework they give us,” said freshman Sydney Glazman on the topic of homework. “Which then gets added to the long list of assignments we need to complete for other classes, along with the activities we participate in aside from school, and the necessary time we need to spend with our friends and family.”

I understand why teachers feel the need to assign homework because to a certain extent it does help with learning the material, but homework has been taken to a whole new level. Student body President Nicholas Durham sums up a student perspective in saying: “I wouldn’t dread doing my homework so much if it was more meaningful and helpful.”

Homework has mainly taken away from the three S’s: social time, sleep and sports (or other extra-curriculars). “I think we have way too much homework,” said freshman Addie Derrick. “It takes time away from social hours and after school athletics and clubs. These are all part of healthy teenage years and it is being robbed from of us.”

All teenagers need sleep to stay healthy, a social life to enjoy high school and extra-curriculars to not only stay active, but also to get into college. Unfortunately Addie was right: (All of these things are being robbed from us. Honor student Catherine Johnson is taking all advanced classes and has around six hours of homework every night, which she thinks is “absolutely ridiculous,” and it is. Freshman Kenson Marbut also agrees that all of our free time is being taken away from us. “When it comes to clubs, after school activities, sports, family time, social time, and sleep, homework takes up all of my time,” she said.

We need to be healthy and having homework isn’t doing it for us. If we didn’t have homework, students could spend more time at tutorial or doing our own studying to get ready for tests.

The last thing I have to say about homework is that more teachers were working together to make sure their major assignments aren’t always overlapping, students would be less stressed and more able to invest their time into each classes assignments. “I think homework is a good thing but the teachers should correlate more so there isn’t so much at a time and we can balance social time and school time,” said Morgan Smith.