For some students school is seen as bothersome and time consuming. After eight hours of schoolwork, many seek an opportunity to relax and decompress. With the mountains of homework assigned to students every day it is difficult for them to relax. These never ending responsibilities make them feel stressed and over burdened.

“Personally I don’t see a point in homework,” junior Bradley Stewart said. “Because everyone nowadays has so much going on outside of school like work or helping their families, but homework is a thing on your shoulder that keeps pinching you and dragging you down when you don’t want it to.”

In a study that surveyed more than 4,300 students from 10 high-performing public and private high schools in upper-middle-class communities, researchers found that homework is a main cause of stress for students.

“I think it’s good to work on stuff at home that you are passionate about,” English teacher Madelyn Johnson said. “It’s always good to be learning and reading at home, but I don’t necessarily agree that it is necessary for students to have hours and hours of homework.”

Through students’ eyes, homework can take too much time. On the other hand, some students see video games as an escape to the school day stress caused by constant grading and correction of teachers; the games allow students to unwind from the steady workload and settle their minds.

“While homework helps you raise your grade if you need it, video games have a more positive impact than homework,” junior Kennedy Gordon said.

Homework causes stress while video games can help relax and calm students after a stressful day. Some students would much rather come home to play video games for a few hours to get their minds off of academics stress, rather than spending the rest of their day doing homework.

“Video games provide a creative break from the stress of the day, to give yourself some practice at failure, and to just enjoy your life,” Johnson said.

Homework on the other hand demonstrates that if students gets stuck or confused, usually students tend to give up or not even attempt it at all. More and more teachers are beginning to realize that not all students have the time to do all of their assigned homework, so they reduce the amount of they give out in order to allow students to live their lives.

“I feel like video games are a metaphor for life; if you’re playing Mario for the very first time and you’re walking along and you see one of those plants, you might think it is cute and cuddly so you jump on it,” Johnson said. “Then you learn that you die, but instead of giving up you start over and when you see that plant again you know this time you jump over it. Video games teach failure as a positive thing rather than a negative thing.”