Forty-five minutes a night, for juniors and seniors, is the amount of time teachers are limited to assigning per subject for homework, according to the Upper School (US) academic policies laid out in the student handbook. For freshmen and sophomores, the limit is 30 minutes. History Teacher Sasha Lyons said while teachers try to follow the guidelines, doing so is not always straightforward.
“We’re very aware of the limits,” she said. “We get told about them often in case we’re not aware. That doesn’t mean we are always able to follow the guidelines, but mostly people try.”
That limit applies to individual assignments. In practice, Ms. Lyons said it is difficult to predict how long work will take, and it varies by student.
“Sometimes we don’t know exactly how much time it’s going to take to do any particular assignment, and the other problem is it differs from student to student,” she said. “Some students might absolutely be able to do my homework in 30 minutes, and some students might not.”
At the start of the year, Ms. Lyons encourages her students to speak up when homework consistently takes longer than it should. However, she has noticed students often are hesitant to reach out if the night’s homework exceeds the time limit.
“Generally, people are just uncomfortable talking to teachers about that, especially individually,” she said. “Sometimes you’ll get a class period where one person will say, ‘Oh, this homework took so long,’ and other people will say ‘Oh yeah, I had trouble with that too.’ Then you can get a conversation started about a particular assignment and get some feedback.”
Daniella Hammerschlag ’28 said that US teachers are generally adaptable with homework.
“A lot of my teachers are pretty understanding. If I am not going to get my homework done in 45 minutes, I set the boundary for myself that I’m not going to do more than 45 minutes of homework.”
Daniella said homework time limits become harder to manage when multiple assessments are due across different classes in the same week.
“Sometimes it’s projects and tests I have on top of homework so then it gets really messy,” she said. “Even if it’s ‘only 45 minutes of homework,’ it’s 45 minutes, plus studying for two other tests that week, so it’s not really 45 minutes.”
She said homework often gets in the way of other school activities.
“For a school that encourages us to explore extracurriculars, with CAB blocks and stuff like that, if homework is simply busywork, why are we not spending that time doing something that interests us?”
Math Teacher Chip Rollinson said the gradual increase in homework workloads by grade level is intended to prepare students for the future.
“As students get older, we have to get them more and more ready for college where the expectations are higher,” he said. “Getting kids more ready for college is why it makes sense to have a little bit of a higher expectation, ramp it up a little bit.”
Mr. Rollinson asks his students to fill out a brief homework feedback form every night so he can get a sense of how long and difficult each assignment is.
“You hear some teachers that are not always following the rules. I think students should first try to work with their teacher if this is the case,” he said. “If that doesn’t work, they should communicate their concerns with their advisors or the department head.”
Natalie Barouch ’29 said longer assignments like essays and research papers often extend beyond class time expectations.
“I’ve definitely spent even up to a couple hours on homework, especially when there are projects,” she said. “For the history research paper, over the weekend I had to work on it for three hours because I didn’t have enough time in my class to do it.”
Justin Hildebrandt ’27 finds the homework load at the US to be generally reasonable.
“It’s overwhelming only when there are big projects hanging around,” he said. “I just had my junior profile, and having that compounded with other homework was super hard for me. It felt like everything else was extra, or the junior profile became kind of extra and I wouldn’t work on it as much, so I feel like it’s hard when big things in multiple classes start colliding, but on average, it is not too much.”
