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Homework is the cornerstone of nearly every teacher's practice in Australia. Today's students in year 9 are expected to complete approximately 90 minutes of homework each night. Many teachers, students and parents feel that homework should be completely banned. I believe that homework should be optional and nearly completely banned.
More than 50% of Australian children are obese. Many people blame laziness, T.V, consoles (Play Station/2 Xbox etc) and computer games but they hardly ever blame homework. This is the major cause of obesity in Australian children. People also don't think about children learning without homework eg T.V, reading materials. And other types of health (not including physical (obesity) are also effected eg social health. It also can be not healthy to not have leisure time from all those hours of school. If we spend all those hours of unhealthy education and still get homework, is the education good enough?

How much family conflict does homework cause? (Struggling students need help.) Struggling students at school probably hate school and have to always catch up and don't get time to willingly revise on current work done in class. Parents who take homework for granted may force their children to do homework and sometimes get argued back in return. Teachers may get argued at when students can't complete homework for reasons like: it's too hard; which can sometimes be a valued excuse. Homework sometimes can be too hard for certain students. This is the conflict homework cause at both home and school.
Homework does have good sides to it. Homework can improve students' intelligence. But what is school for? It prepares students for V.C.E and University/TAFE. Does it take 11 years of homework to prepare for 2-6 years in the future? It does help students to revise the work they have done in class. Most homework has nothing to do with the work done in class and revising should be optional because it's for their own good. Finally parents can help students with the work in class through homework. But this can lead to parent's nearly doing all the homework for them.
Finally I argue that homework is too irrelevant. Most of the homework given has nothing to do with the work done in class which, in other words, has no point related to school. Also, parents are not professional teachers. Students in many cases need teachers help in class, so why is this work sent home? Parents normally end up helping students with homework and sometimes the students can know more about the class topic then the parent. So, no help is given. After having all this pressure everyday, eventually some students get other people to do their homework for them.
Most of the homework given should be banned because it's too time consuming, causes conflict at school and home and it's irrelevant. These points can cancel out some of the good things about homework. Revision and assignments should be the only type of homework students get (revision should be optional).

Learn more about this author, Christopher Raymond.
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