Extracurricular activities are great ways to learn and develop skills. When you take one, you might think "Hey, these are so great! Everyone should take one!" But that really isn't the case for everyone. Most people have differing time schedules from one another, Some people have to cook dinner for their families or do a wide variety of chores once they get home, or they have plans with their family and friends. to make them take a extracurricular activity may push their chores and/ or responsibilities further into the night. Speaking about responsibilities, what about homework?

Homework, middleschoolers and highschoolers are smothered with it every day, every week, every year. Homework, depending on your academic intelligence, may take a while, it may make them stay up late on a school day. Students usually stay up late at night doing homework, and making them do a extracurricular activity during the school year may make them stay up later due to not having that time after they leave school to do their homework, they may end up being more fatigued, they may not turn in their homework, and they may not be able to do their share of the project making people look badly upon them and making their grades suffer, When you have to stay up late at night, you usually are more tired, less aware, and your grades may drop.

When you are smothered with homework, you usually stay up at night, sluggishly going through the homework so you can finally go to sleep, in FCPS, at the beginning of the year, the teachers reported that homework usually takes 2 to 4 hours. The students go home at 2:22, but they usually get home by 2:50, or 3 during unlucky circumstances. What if we added about 2 hours to that? they get home by 4 in the afternoon, they now have to do their homework. That may take them about 3 and a half hours and by now, its 7:30, the plans they had, down the drain, now they have eat dinner and go to bed because they have to wake up at 5 or 6 in the morning to catch a bus that comes at 6:30. Their weekdays just practically consist of school and homework. they will get not free time until the weekend, and that isn't guaranteed because some teachers will assign homework during the weekends! According to a study, when students have no free time and their time just consists of homework, that will lead up to more stress, and stress leads up to anxiety, and anxiety leads up to depression.

If anything, we should make extracurricular activities optional because of these questions, "Do they have the time?"

"Will they be able to keep up?" "Will they be able to do this without getting too stressed out?" "Do they have too much homework?". Extracurricular activities should be optional because students should choose what they want to do or they don't want to do, they are freethinking.