They say high school is supposed to be the best years of your life. And everyone comes in optimistic, until they end up with about three and a half hours of homework every night.

According to the U.S News and World Report, this amounts to as much as 17 hours a week. Add that to the time spent in competitive sports and very involved activities, and there’s not much time to enjoy these ‘best years.’

This much work is not doing any good for students’ mental health either. According to a study of about 1,000 teens, reported by the Washington Post, 83 percent said school was a main source of anxiety for them. In addition, 32 percent of these teens reported that they experienced headaches, and a third reported they laid awake at night in worry due to school.

And is all this work helping students out? According to the Huffington Post, American teens scored lower on math assessments in relation to the amount of homework they did. This shows that the quantity of the work does not matter, but the type of work does.

Schools should not be assignment-based, but rather have creative lessons and an environment made to encourage students to learn and discover for themselves. This would take the stress out of learning and truly allow students to get the most they can out of school.

Teachers should encourage students to like learning and want to come to school, instead of sucking the excitement out of learning and make students have to drag themselves out of bed every morning.

It wouldn’t take much — a little less attention to curriculum, a little more time making creative lessons on the teachers’ parts.

It would be less work for students and teachers, less homework, less grading, less stress.