The homework policy for the 2016-17 school year suggests cutting down on the number of hours of homework per class allowed each week.

After reviewing the plans for next year’s homework policy, The Revolution has come to the conclusion that, not only did the people who created this neglect to pay much attention to the policy’s rules towards high schoolers workload, they also neglected to address and understand the complaints coming from high schoolers in the first place.

The policy states that high schoolers should have no more than 2 hours of homework each week per core class, no more than 1.5 hours per week from electives and no more than 1 hour a week from physical education (does P.E. actually give homework?)

AP and Dual Enrollment classes are allowed about 3 hours per week; however, “Parents and students should expect that some of the assignments in these courses will exceed the time limitations designated for high school credit classes.”

Reading this exception, it can be interpreted as either being more than the 2 hours for other classes and capped at 3 hours, or it can read as being more than the 3 hour limit placed on it.

If teachers have the ability to interpret this rule any way they prefer, they could give limitless amounts of homework to AP or Dual students and still technically be following the rules. This solves no problems, and actually gives teachers more freedom to pile on the extra work as they please.

While about 30 minutes of homework per class a night sounds amazing, it is also completely unrealistic. It might work well for honors classes and below, and it might work well for science and math classes where the homework is ordinarily pretty light anyway. However, the real problem high schoolers complained about isn’t these classes at all, but the multitude of AP and Dual classes filling up their schedules.

While people might look at this and think we should, “stop complaining about the work load because we signed up for it,” it is important to note that a majority of students taking these upper level classes do it to look impressive to colleges. Colleges expect to see a challenging course load in which we achieve high grades, along with participation in extracurriculars, sports, jobs, community service, etc.  And as the years have passed, it seems as though college acceptance has become more competitive, and admissions offices look for even bigger resumes. Just by showing an interest in furthering our education, we are being forced to fill our schedules to the brim with everything we can possibly participate in.

Besides this, we are also told to get 8 hours of sleep a night and attempt to have a social life to keep us sane. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to complete everything we need to get done.

Since when did high school become so overwhelming and stressful that we have to keep tissues next to our desk to dab away the tears that hit the pages of our history textbook so the ink doesn’t smudge?

One last plea to whoever finalizes this homework policy: please revise the AP and Dual section of it. It isn’t clear enough, and giving teachers the freedom to interpret it however they want completely defeats the purpose of revising the policy in the first place.

High school should be about having fun, not being overworked to the point of having mental breakdowns in our beds at midnight or stress eating whole bags of Dove chocolates in one sitting; we have college and the rest of our lives for that.