This speech is written by one of my grade 7 students. He has started his speech with a personal anecdote, which not only sets the scene but also attracts the attention of the audience. He has also included a number of other stories to appeal to listeners’ emotions. At times, he has applied some sense of humor as well as some reasons, which can strengthen his stance on the issue. Of course, readers should remember that the script is only fifty percent of the task; the other is how the speech is presented.
Repetitive Homework Gets an F- from Me
It’s 12 am, and I’m still up. My dad is yelling at me to go to sleep from time to time, but I’m sitting at my desk doing homework, ignoring the yelling. The homework isn’t hard, but it’s repetitive and tedious enough to keep me up until 12 am. These questions are so simple in quality, yet so hard in quantity. I started speeding through these questions since 4 pm, and I’m still stuck to this desk. These tedious worksheets always keep me up wide awake until 12. This is a typical evening of my life.
Many schools use this technique of making students learn how to solve a problem, which is constantly handing out worksheets of the same kinds of problems. It may be useful to particular kids who don’t seem to grasp the essence of the new lesson, but we need to remember that those students only make up a very small percentage of each class. The rest of the students in the class are able to understand fairly quickly after doing several worksheets of the problems, yet unfortunately, all the students are assigned dozens of worksheets of the same problem. Doing so many worksheets of what one already knows sounds awfully tedious.
Besides the “tedious” factor of this technique, it’s also really time-consuming. Many people, including me, have other things that are way more preferable and important to do. Those things are activities such as playing musical instruments, sports, and other extracurriculars. Some people have these activities as their hobbies and life, and having been assigned these tedious homework sheets, they may not have the time to do their personal hobbies. These sheets also take away the time to do the productive homework assigned by private teachers. The school teachers will accomplish nothing but give the students more stress-related diseases.
Dawniel Patterson Winningham, the mother of a 16-year-old and two 14-year-old twins, states that her kids are busy enough with their activities outside of school. The 16-year-old boy plays football, and the twins play basketball. “I have seen them stay up as late as midnight trying to juggle both extracurriculars and homework,” Winningham says. This is a very good example of kids undergoing stress, which can give them stress-related diseases if it is like this all the time.
Also, this tedious and time-consuming technique defeats the purpose of helping students learn how to solve a problem, therefore making it ineffective. For students who haven’t yet grasped the concepts of the new lesson, merely assigning a huge volume of worksheets, hoping that it will help students understand, is a waste of time and resources as to these students, the worksheets look like paper with black ink marks on them. By assigning these worksheets, the students who don’t understand are forced to complete assignments that they don’t understand.
One time, I, myself was not that good at English. The only mark I got was an unsatisfactory B minus. Due to these conditions, my mom sent me to an English tutor who claimed she was a very good one. I got put into a group class, and from the start of the class, the teacher started assigning all of the class, including me, a paragraph. Over the course of a few weeks, all we worked on was the paragraph, and when the teacher wasn’t satisfied with the writing; she just made us do it again without telling us what was wrong. As a result, all I made was friends, not language improvements, because the technique the teacher used was what schools currently use, and that technique defeats the purpose. In other words, the teacher kept handing the writing pieces back to us repetitively without telling my class where the piece went downhill.
Some people are also getting poor health conditions from these homework sheets. Stanford University professor Denis Pope says that “high-achieving students who are swamped with homework can suffer from poor mental and physical health.” This means that good students who get a lot of homework can get sick as well as huge amounts of stress, and to be honest, these students, who are working hard for good marks, usually suffer from poor health, which makes it totally unfair to hardworking students.
To sum up, schools should stop assigning repetitive homework because they are tedious, time-consuming, ineffective, and health-threatening. To avoid these aspects of homework, all teachers should stop assigning homework with the same exercises and instead, teach them in an effective way. When the teachers actually do so, only then will school be more fun, and less hated.