First Person Singular: Does homework contribute to obesity?

By Beth Belcher
Herbert Hoover High School

Obesity is a common problem in today’s children. A decrease in exercise and an increase in video game playing and TV watching is partially to blame for this.

But could this decrease in exercise be related to an increase in homework?

I personally have at least one, if not two hours of homework daily. And in one of my classes, I’ll have at least two, but usually three, different activities to do.

Teachers give outrageous amounts of homework. They apparently think we don’t have lives outside of school, and the way they assign homework seems to say they don’t care.

Is it possible that children and teens would exercise more if they had less homework? I think so.

After a stressful day at school, the last thing I want to do is homework. And by the time I finish it, I am usually too tired to do anything else.

I like to run in the evenings, but with the amount of homework I’ve had this year, I have not had time.

Could stress over school also be causing obesity? Again, I say yes. Anymore, the grade school kids that I know have more homework than I did at their age, and sometimes theirs rivals my current amount.

It is ridiculous to give kids this much homework. Some of the things that school teaches us, we’ll never use in the real world.

School should prepare us for life. Other than an English major, I do not know of anyone who would sit and dissect sentences daily. So why does it matter whether or not we know the proper name of sentence parts as long as we can use them correctly?

If schools would gear curriculum towards the real world, then there would be less need for homework. And if there were less homework, then there might be less obesity.