Homework is (usually) lame

I think that most high school students, and students in general will agree with the idea that homework isn't very enjoyable.  However, it does serve a purpose.  Allowing students to reinforce skills and knowledge gained in class and perhaps generate questions for the next class are all very important reasons for teachers to assign homework.  However, teachers (not all but some) have begun to drift away from assigning purposeful homework and instead simply assigned homework because it is what is expected, or because it is part of the curriculum.

While to some degree 'busy work' may be necessary for some students to practice ideas covered in class, this isn't always the case and such homework should simply be 'strongly recommended' so that students who don't feel the need (different from desire) to do it can spend their after school time doing other things besides hours and hours of homework. 

Homework isn't the only thing taking up high-schoolers' after school time.  Most student participate in at least some extracurricular activity such as a sport.  These activities (especially stage crew, sports, or other competitive clubs) can take up several hours of a student's time, not to mention that teenagers need to eat, perhaps spend time with their family, and require more sleep than any other age group excepting infants.  However with an half-hour (or more) of homework from the usual 5 or so academic class a student might have in a day (6 classes per day, one of which is usually gym or an off lab) plus extracurricular activities, plus dinner, plus out of school activities, plus a recommended 8 hours of sleep, there simply isn't enough time for every item to get the attention that it deserves.  The things that usually suffer in this case are family time, non-school activities, and sleep.  This can have very negative consequences such as straining parent/child relationships, limiting creativity, and decreasing student's ability to fight of disease or function in school (the very thing that is keeping them from sleep).

A variety of solutions to this problem exist, but the one that I (and probably most high-schoolers' would agree) prefer is to only assign necessary amounts of homework.  If instead of half an hour to 45 minutes of homework from 5 classes, students only needed to do 20 minutes from 3 classes, an hour and a half of time would be created for students to spend time with their family, express their creativity, explore their interests outside of school, or sleep as they see fit.  I think that this has a high chance of having a positive impact on students' lives and their ability to succeed in school.