Editor’s Note: This piece is part of a head-to-head, in which two writers argue opposing sides of a given issue. The accompanying article can be found here.

School, extracurriculars, homework, sleep, repeat. That is the story of my life. This should sound somewhat familiar to anyone who’s been in high school. Right off the bat I’m going to state that, if I had zero homework, then I would be perfectly happy with my life—kind of. Night after night, I struggle with finishing my homework efficiently—without procrastination—and with quality. While it undoubtedly has its benefits, too much homework can just be an unneeded weight that’s pushing down and suppressing me. So, I wanted to know how much everyone else could relate.

On October 1, I sent out a very short survey via email to the whole high school—thanks, by the way, if you responded. On it, I wrote, “Parker should give ____ homework out every day,” letting respondents choose between “more,” “the same amount of,” and “less.” Out of the 156 people who took the survey, only 2 responded with “more”—that’s less than 1.3%. I would also make the argument that if every other high schooler were to respond, the miniscule percentage saying “more,” would only drop down further. For all I know, all the students who didn’t take the survey were probably too drowned in homework to respond.

The remainder of responses were 29.5% voting for “the same amount of” homework, and around 69.2% for “less.”

These statistics segue into my least refutable, argument– nearly seven out of ten of my fellow Parker students feel overburdened with work after school.

The other part of my survey asked, “On average, how much time do you spend on homework every day?” When I averaged out the amount of time, I got 2.89 hours– in other words two hours and about 54 minutes. It should be said that, based on my past experience, that number will only increase the further we progress into the school year.

Now one might say just under 3 hours is not a lot at all, you get home at 4:30 and start your homework, then finish at 7:30. But in reality, you have to factor in all the other little parts of life. For me, I have eating food, maintaining personal hygiene, The Weekly, Model UN, music, out-of-school sports, spring in-school sports, and most importantly, something called procrastination.

18.5% of responses—myself included—said that they had four hours of homework a day, and another 8.3% said that they had five or more. So… does the faculty and administration know this? I honestly hope not, because if so, they would be intentionally ignoring a quarter of their students who are struggling night after night with excessive amounts of work.

I talked to a couple of teachers, and they expressed that they try to not give out more than an hour of homework every night. The problem with that is if a student has an hour of homework in each of five subjects, in addition to any kind of sports and or extracurriculars as was mentioned earlier, then that workload is simply asking far too much out of us.

Now I’m not saying that all teachers agree with one hour homework policy. Most often they give half or sometimes less than that, but all too often will every teacher will be conscientious of only their own assigned homework—and oblivious to all that of other teachers and to the other responsibilities in their students’ lives. And let’s be honest, there are many times, at least for me, where students can have two or even three hours of homework in one subject. Just think of a big project or maybe essay with a small time frame given for completion.

In 2013, research conducted at Stanford University found that students in high-achieving communities—such as Parker—who spend too much time on homework experience more stress, physical health problems, and a lack of balance in their lives. That study suggested that any more than two hours of homework per night is counterproductive. Remember what I said before about the average amount of homework being 2 hours and 54 minutes?

The researchers also found that spending too much time on homework meant that students were not meeting other developmental needs or cultivating critical life skills. Students were more likely to not participate from activities, stop seeing friends or family, and not not pursue personal hobbies. Such a claim seems completely germane to Parker, as it’s not every day that we see students fully investing themselves in their own, individualistic hobbies while spending a great amount of time with the rest of their family.

The study lastly found that over 80% of the 4,300 surveyed said that they experienced some kind of physical symptom of stress, such as headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss, and stomach problems.

What this one survey found really just scraped the top of this issue. I know that for myself, once stress starts to build up, I start to experience not just sleep deprivation, but emotional fatigue—when I just want to give up. I’ve also found that unreasonable amounts of work can give me negative attitudes about learning, leading to low-quality work, shortcuts, or forms of cheating to the point where there’s not only zero gain, but in fact causes a damaging effect on students. The purpose of homework can simply be counterproductive when used excessively.

I brought up before that I talked to a few teachers, and almost all of them gave me the same reasoning as to what benefits homework can give to students. So yes, there are some facts that I simply cannot deny about homework’s upsides.

One of these is that students who do more homework perform better in school. Multiple studies have proven this, and such a concept is the core of one of the most comprehensive pieces of research on homework made-by Duke University psychology professor, Harris Cooper, in 2006. To dispute this, though, I would say correlation is not causation. So in other words, does homework cause achievement, or do high achievers do more homework?

Students can learn challenging skills even when less homework is assigned. That’s what I think, and it’s been proven. A California teacher who taught AP biology experimented the use of homework by dramatically cutting down after-school assignments. First she cut homework by a third, and then cut the assignments in half. The students’ test scores didn’t change.

So now the question is, how—as a student body and institution—do we create a dramatic change like this?

Again, I wouldn’t suggest no homework, but I hope I’ve proven that a middle ground should be in place, with no more than two hours of homework a night. I know that’s a challenging goal to achieve, especially seeing as we all work at different rates, but there are various strategies that could be gradually implemented.

We could establish a teacher’s network where they could view the estimated amount of work on an assignment in another subject, or come to a compromise, so as to not exceed a combined two hours of homework.

This may be complicated, but we could also try giving one class period the majority of work for one day, with a much smaller portion of homework from other periods. For example on Monday, A period would have homework priority, then Tuesday would be B period… F period would be combined for the weekend, then maybe reverse the order for the next week.

And while I could propose many more overly-complex changes, I believe in one key idea that can free up a lot of student time, while providing for increased academic progression: the quality of a homework assignment matters. In other words, teachers need to make their homework more concise and more purposeful. This will hopefully make homework less of an enemy.

And if you’re one of those two people who said they want more homework, then maybe try doing something a little more exciting with your life—spend more time on the things that truly matter to you.