Washington DC Taiwanese School (WDCTS) is a non-profit organization that teaches children from ages 2-18 Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese and exposes children to traditional Taiwanese culture. They have approximately 60-100 students per year. WDCTS holds classes every Sunday for around 90 minutes per class. 

   Usually beginning from Preschool or Kindergarten, students begin getting homework. Generally, homework is 4-6 pages long and can take in between 2 and 10 hours to complete every week. The homework is overall very difficult, repetitive, and time-consuming. Some students don't have enough time to do the homework. For many students, this is something that they don't want to worry about during the week. Balancing schoolwork, Chinese/Taiwanese homework, and extracurricular activities get harder and harder as the student gets older. "Especially since I started middle school recently, managing my time with schoolwork and my Chinese homework has been difficult for me," an anonymous middle school-aged student at WDCTS said. Students, like this one, feel stressed out by their workload, and adding a very long packet of homework doesn't help.

    Most of Washington DC Taiwanese School's teachers are parent volunteers who were born in Taiwan and are fluent in Mandarin and Taiwanese. Being a teacher at WDCTS is not their main job and they usually have another job during the week. Along with having to work diligently for their career, they also have to raise their child(ren) and grade Chinese/Taiwanese homework. It seems that the homework load for students has made it difficult for teachers to grade, resulting in a lot of them grading for completion or not even looking at it at all. Students are not provided with any feedback and will improve much less this way.

    A lot of parents of students at WDCTS say that it's also stressful for them- not just the students and teachers. For many parents, it's difficult for them to help with this difficult Chinese or Taiwanese work that is given to their children because they aren't able to understand the work. A lot of students have parents who don't understand Chinese/Taiwanese so it makes it very difficult to help them, especially with 5 or 6 pages.

   While de-stressing parents, teachers, and students, the homework that WDCTS gives to students can be changed to become less stressful and more productive. Every week, the homework that students are given is extremely repetitive and works best for few learning styles. Varying the homework formats every week can also help students learn better.

  While abolishing homework at WDCTS all together could negatively impact the students' performance, reducing the amount of homework would reduce the stress of students and potentially make students' performance even better because they're less stressed out. A good amount of homework would be 2-3 pages per week. Students shouldn't be spending more than 2 hours on their Chinese/Taiwanese homework every week. They should be learning Chinese or Taiwanese in a relaxed way that still helps them learn better and faster.

  Overall, reducing the workload at home for students at the Washington DC Taiwanese school would positively affect the parents, student body and teachers because it would make it less stressful for them.