“I spent four hours on homework last night—just for this class!” The phrase is a constant greeting every time I step into my AP US History class on a B-day morning, or after lunch in AP Lang. Sometimes it is said with irritation, others almost with a morbid sense of pride. Homework and notes in my advanced classes, whether they are AP or even college in the high school, consume hour after hour of my life outside of school. I realize that these classes are important for my future success in both college and life, but really, does there have to be so much work?

There have been studies that show how outside of school learning improves in-class learning by some percentage or another, and I agree with that. Without homework, I’d probably forget part of what we learned the previous day the minute my head hit the pillow. But when I have to skip a simple hour and a half soccer practice because my APUSH homework is taking three hours longer than I thought, we have a problem.

After a certain amount of time of doing homework, I begin to shut down. I’ll fall asleep on top of my textbook, or my three-page analysis of Patrick Henry becomes less analytical than it had been. Work has a tendency to wear one down, especially when it’s day after day at an exhausting caliber. After two or three (or even four) years of this, I’m done. Plain and simple. It’s not that I don’t want to do the work and the learning; it’s just that mentally I can’t.

I think that it would be in the best interest of high school students everywhere that are taking advanced courses if their teachers would just cut the homework load in half. We’re already challenging ourselves, I really don’t think that killing ourselves with hours of nightly homework should be required as well.