15 Types of Homework Memes That Students Know All Too Well

Memes can be funny, bittersweet, or nostalgic, but the one thing that the best of them all share is being relatable. Someone might call them silly, but memes are a way for us to connect with others.

There’s nothing silly about that. Something as small as an online homework meme can help us remember our shared humanity, and there’s beauty in that.

When you’re a student putting off a 5-page essay or struggling with a last-minute chemistry lab report, you want a meme that will instantly show you that you are not alone. Hundreds of thousands of students across the world are going through the same thing in this exact moment.

It’s comforting and might actually motivate you to finally write the first sentence. The rest will get easier from there. Once you’ve overcome the fear of the blank page, even the scariest assignment no longer seems all that scary.

To give you that much-needed push to start your homework, and perhaps something to occupy your writing breaks with, we’ve rounded up a collection of funny homework memes that meet all the key criteria of a good meme. They are:

• Relatable enough
• Funny
• Lighthearted
• Concise
• Culturally relevant.

We hope these will make you cackle or, at the very least, smile. Plus, you’ll have a few to share with your friends and classmates to brighten their study sessions, too.

Don’t gatekeep – good memes are meant to be shared. Few things are more heart-warming than the sense that someone you know saw something online, thought, “They’ll love it!”, and shared it with you.

Let’s start with the heavy hitter that will resonate with every student: the “I hate homework” memes. They usually go like this:

• “I hate homework!” accompanied by Kermit the Frog, sad SpongeBob, or literally any other culturally relevant memeable character you can think of.
• Or they can take an aggressive twist and feature the Disaster Girl (the one with the house burning behind her), accompanied by “I said I hated homework, didn’t I?”

This is probably the broadest category of memes on this list; they come in all shapes and forms. For example, a well-known and frequently shareable college homework meme that you’ll probably instantly recognize is this one:

• Me: “I’ll do all my homework on Sunday, it’s not that hard.”
• Me on Sunday: A picture of a random person in obvious despair, drowning in papers on their bed or behind their desk.

What can you do? Happens to the best of us.

The rivalry between STEM and humanities students is a thing as old as time. STEM majors love to say that humanities students have it easy and that their degrees are useless. In turn, STEM majors are roasted for their nerdiness and “lack of culture.”

For some reason, though, humanities majors’ struggle with math is a way more memeable topic than vice versa.

A good example is the “Stabilize the reactor core” vs. “Write an essay about gender.” If you get it, you get it. If you don’t, a math solver might make your life a little easier.

Memes with minions are considered a bit of a boomer thing these days, but this doesn’t make them any less accurate at times.

You can’t deny that homework + minions make perfect sense. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a lovely obedient servant completing all your homework assignments for you, the supervillain?

But our favorite is the one where a confused minion is looking lost next to a pile of papers, and the caption says, “We have homework???” Yeah, we’ve all been there.

The popularity of ChatGPT memes proves that a good meme has to be culturally relevant. There are too many of them to list here, but here are a couple of popular varieties:

• ChatGPT carrying a student out of a burning building.
• The infamous car scene from The Umbrella Academy, with teachers who used ChatGPT to write questions looking at their students who used it to answer those questions.

The problem might not be who invented homework, but who made it mandatory, though the meme culture doesn’t really care. The two most popular types of memes cursing the inventor of homework are these:

• Former students looking for the person who invented homework in the afterlife – supposedly to have a nice, friendly chat with whoever it was.
• An angry-looking character from basically any movie, cartoon, or TV show you can think of going after the inventor of homework.

Memes that try to make light of how stressful homework can get are similar to the “I hate homework” kind and equally relatable. One of the most popular memes that belongs to this category is this one:

• Students: stressed and tired after 5 hours’ worth of homework
• Teachers: “I said we’re happy today.”

Bonus points if it was an essay for a psychology class on the harmful impact of stress or something equally ironic.

Every student knows that if their homework is not done, they have only two options: bargain or beg. Memes tend to go the second route, which is why most popular missing homework memes feature Din Grogu, better known as Baby Yoda.

That said, you could always get creative and write an AI song about why you need an extension. It’s been an unexpectedly popular genre on TikTok lately.

Pictures of cute animals are the one thing that can make most of us feel a little better, no matter how stressed we are. It makes perfect sense that so many homework memes feature a cat or a puppy; the caption and the emotion behind it vary.

We have a favorite, though.

• It’s a picture of a cat, captioned: “Don’t even try to tell me the dog ate your homework.” Is there anyone who hasn’t used this excuse at least once in their lifetime?

Science homework memes are a bit of an acquired taste: to understand most of them, you need to pay attention in science class.

• This one is the perfect illustration: it features plastic H₂O molecule models scattered across a page from someone’s science homework, and the caption says, “Oops, I dropped water all over my homework.” Unless you know what an H₂O molecule looks like, you won’t get it.

You’re probably looking for these to see that you aren’t the only one not doing your homework when you should be.

You aren’t. Procrastination is the second thing that unites all students (the first one is their shared hatred for homework).

Anyway, our favorite meme about actively avoiding homework goes like this:

• The main character from The Sound of Music is spinning, surrounded by beautiful mountains. She looks very carefree. The caption says: “Look at all the homework I’m not doing.”

Good for you, Maria.

Frankly, most homework memes are about stress in one way or another, so it didn’t seem fair to only include them in this list once. Here goes another one:

• SpongeBob, who represents the education system in this case, is holding a paper that says: “Homework causes stress.” He then burns it.

With how much research is now available on the very real and scary consequences of school-related stress, this is sadly accurate.

Let’s all agree that homework expected to be completed over the weekend should be illegal. Unfortunately, though, it’s very much legal, hence the weekend homework memes.

One of them captures what we think perfectly:

• When a teacher gives homework over the weekend: “Saturday is a day for sleeping.”

And if you ask us, so is Sunday!

We don’t recommend fact-checking this one, or it’ll stop being funny. However, according to a once-popular Internet myth, “homework” spelled backwards (so, “krowemoh”) meant “child abuse” in Latin.

If you ever had to study Latin in school, even if for one semester, you are well aware that krowemoh doesn’t even look or sound like a Latin word. But honestly, who cares? It’s a meme.

Finally, the most shareable and arguably the most accurate meme about homework is the homework definition meme. It presents the word “homework” as an acronym that means the following:

• “H.O.M.E.W.O.R.K.: Half of my energy wasted on random knowledge.”

Whoever came up with this deserves an award. The next researcher who decides to publish a book on the stress-inducing potential of homework should use this as the title.

"Memes’ number one job is to be relatable, and they do a great job at it. But that’s not the only reason why looking at funny memes about homework (or watching relevant TikToks and reels if that’s what you prefer) is not just a waste of time.

Good memes also make us laugh, which is the best way to relieve stress. Laughing reduces cortisol, our main stress hormone. So, when you crack up at a funny meme, it might help you calm down and relax a little, even if you have an all-nighter to pull.

Plus, a meme can give you a fun topic for the next time you have to endure small talk. Anyone would take a conversation about homework memes over awkward silence. So, by looking at memes, you’re actually working on becoming a better conversationalist.

All in all, memes are awesome, and homework is anything but.

By the way, if you would still like to know who to blame for your struggles, go read Who Invented Homework and Why? If nothing else, that’s another random fact to add to your collection to beat all your friends at trivia."