I read a lot on CC about homework last year and from everything I read it seemed like homework, even at the tippy top BS was generally manageable if you have a kid who can manage their time well. Of course, there will be a few late nights here and there but several hours of homework seemed to be the consensus. Fast forward to actually living it. Wow, so much more homework than we were lead to believe. Definitely more than the school policy indicates, maybe twice as much. Many quizzes without getting back previous quizzes, papers due right after the rough draft when the rough draft was pointless as it got no teacher feedback.
Teachers saying things “like you have to learn to prioritize and not be so meticulous.” If you are telling my kid to let things slide then you are assigning work with no point and that is professional laziness in my opinion. If an experienced teacher cannot work out how long an assignment is actually going to take a 14 year old then they aren’t a good teacher. And what is the point exactly of learning to let things slide? Never understood this as in my experience it was not a skill I needed at a top college while playing a varsity sport at said college. I always had plenty of time to do my work as did my pre-med husband, also a varsity athlete at the college. So confused as to why a 14 year old needs to learn to either kill herself or settle for sliding grades since that isn’t a skill needed until, IMO, you become a mother. Certainly, if they are “prepping for college” they are waaaaayyy overdoing it first month of freshman year.
Also, if this is the reality why do they lie their faces off when you question them explicitly about homework?
Speak to your child’s advisor! Something is clearly up, and it would be good to figure out what.
While there is a lot of homework, it can get done in the time they have. If your child is up till 2 (or whatever) then something needs fixing. It could be any number of things. It is very unlikely that the school is assigning too much so that most kids are having problems.
Isn’t your child in the 1st year at BS? Don’t forget that right now is the adjustment period when kids are figuring things out.
@cinnamon1212 Yes first year. It is not just my kid though. Pretty much all kids are up till 11-12 using their phone flashlights to do work. Or I should say, the kids my kid has asked - smaller school so she knows a fair amount of freshmen. So I would say many kids are in the same boat. I have been impressed that the kids don’t seem to lie to each other and say they feel the homework is a breeze. They all say they are in the same boat.
I did mention it to a dean and got two responses:
We can’t control what the kids do i.e. working after lights out. This seems to me to indicate that they know kids are mostly staying up later than advertised to do work and they don’t really care to do anything about it. IMO you can do something about it. Actually enforce the homework policy with the teachers.
The kids need to learn when to let things slide.
There are certainly kids who don’t seem to work very hard, but they may be super fast or not care about grades as much.
Perhaps I am simply in a minority thinking that 6-7 hours of sleep is not enough for a 14 year old who is also playing on a varsity team 6 days a week. Injury from lack of sleep is a real thing yo.
@dogsmama1997 , calm down (said while giving you a virtual hug!). I completely agree, kids need more than 6-7 hours of sleep, and I agree, something needs to change. But again, speak with your child’s advisor. They can help figure out what’s going on for your child specifically.
I had kids attend Hotchkiss and Millbrook, on the chance (unlikely) that it’s one of those 2 schools. But if it is maybe I can be more helpful/specific.
Don’t generalize from one or two kids. I had a parent from another school say to me in shock “I hear the kids at Hotchkiss are up until 4 am every night doing homework!” No. That was one kid, who was struggling with time management. That year my son was in bed by 10:30-11.
Your child maybe doesn’t have an issue with time management, but it could be several other things. You will feel better after speaking/emailing with her advisor so you will have a better sense of what’s going on, and probably will have a plan to deal with it.
Sometimes kids are less-than-honest in terms of how they spend their time. For example, they might complain about not having had enough time to do homework or study all term, and then come home with a number of recommendations in terms of Netflix series they watched and loved during said term. Hypothetically, of course. OUR children would never do that.
One side of the story here, and second-hand at that. Certainly the adviser, and perhaps @stargirl3 can add perspective for this school.
However, and I’m not saying this applies to your kid, or the statistically irrelevant subset of the student body he asked, but IME 90 minutes to do 9th grade math HW is overkill. 90 minutes when 60 minutes is spent looking for the answers on the internet, texting while “working,” etc. is not. I suspect there’s more to the story.
I hate to say it, but 6-7 hours of sleep and kids doing work after lights out was pretty much SOP at Choate. I think our son was lucky if he got that much sleep (he got less in college). He slept on breaks and all summer long. I don’t see how any school can control this. It’s up to each student to determine how to manage their homework, study, and sleep schedule. Eventually, they all figure out what works for them. By junior/senior year, they are pros. And, they’re young. It’s amazing how resilient those bodies are.
@dogsmama1997, it is awesome that you are so fully in your D’s camp, but I agree that you are hearing only part of the story. As you reach out to the advisor, here are few things that may be going on.
Based on your D’s BS options, she is clearly bright and hard-working. In all likelihood, she is used to being at the top of the academic heap. Welcome to BS where most of the kids fit this description and probably have a bit of their ego investing in being the top. And by top, I don’t necessarily mean that they are competing with each other, but they are used to doing the kind of work that’ll make them stand out. So when they are all working to do standout work, they are all overworking and feeling like it’s just getting them the marginal results. Most kids in this group always went the extra mile in middle school, but the demands weren’t so great. So the fact that lots of kids are in this boat doesn’t mean that the school lied. But it may mean that a lot of kids are struggling with the way they used to do work and the expectations of what that would yield vs their new reality.
When the school says “learn to prioritize”, they aren’t necessarily saying “don’t do things” but “figure out where your effort belongs”. Having had a kid who never once had a teacher suggest that he be less meticulous (oh, quite the opposite – I am envying you!), I have been a party to this conversation literally DOZENS of times for different reasons. When you have a French worksheet, what is the point? If it is to practice conjugating verbs, review the conjugations briefly, then do the sheet and be done with it. Ditto for math homework. When you get it back or correct it in class, see what you still need to learn, learn it, and move on. If you are writing a paper that is going to count for half your semester grade, you need to “invest” differently in your work product. If you took a quiz and didn’t get it back, was there something you weren’t sure about? Look into it now, not later. (You may have gotten it right by luck!)
My son had a veteran English teacher one year and who used to give what seemed like insanely picky quizzes daily. It turns out that his goal was to get the kids to read very closely the FIRST time they read something. His theory was that when they went to college, they wouldn’t have time to go back and re-read, re-annotate, take new notes. They were going to have to be highly effective on the first pass. After a term of daily quiz results in the 40-75% range (pretty much the norm for this class of highest achieving English students), DS figured out what he needed to be doing. And he says it has been a godsend of a technique in college.
I had said in the GPA thread that our school started every scheduling discussion with the question “Are you getting enough sleep?” Most parents of high-achieving kids assume that their kids should be in the hardest class of everything. (And yes, at your middle school, they probably were and managed to kill it.) So maybe that’s not the case anymore. While a nose to the grindstone bright kid indeed maybe CAN grind it out, perhaps they shouldn’t. A superhard class (for a kid) can require so much time from them for a B that there isn’t enough left for the things that they should be able to do in other classes to get an A and even enjoy it. Figuring out how to have time for what they like and what they excel in while addressing the necessary is tricky. This is another version of the prioritization and of course assumes that they really are spending all that time studying!.
I recall that your D is a day student. She MAY be spending free time she has during the day socializing rather than studying, yet she may actually need to be taking care of some of those homework obligations during the day. I think this is a special struggle for day students because their time on campus is the time they can spend with their school friends.
This is a great chance to experiment with study groups and also making use of the consultations. If a teacher says “Be less meticulous”, go to those office hours and ask how they can get what they need to get out of the work that can be done with less care. It’s also a great way to tinker with how time is used. Does it make sense to schedule study time to review so that “studying for a test” is more of a review than a 4 hour undertaking the night before the test? I don’t know how long your drive to school is, but DS used the morning drive every day to review or do worksheets. Found time!
Freshman year grades don’t make a huge difference in college admissions so both you and your D can relax on that front. This is a GREAT time to experience and experiment with expectations and how to learn. You may not believe me when I say this, but two years from now, your D will look back on this year and marvel at how easy it was (compared to what she can now do) and wonder why it seemed to hard.
For your part, make it clear to your D that all that matters to you is that she make her best effort and figure out how to balance her life so that she’s happy and healthy. If she’s getting the feeling from you that you expect her to excel – something she’s probably already put on herself – the stress won’t help and may even slow her down in doing her work. Rather than blaming the school, help her talk through how to figure out how to streamline her work. I’m not saying that she’ll be able to get everything done in 2 hours and turn out the lights at 10:00 every night, but this will find its rhythm. Really wishing the best for both of you.
One more point to add in addition to @gardenstategal 's excellent analysis:
Most of these kids are used to having all A’s in MS. Here’s the reality - 95% will graduate from a BS with less than a 4.0 GPA, and they will still do well in life. So no need to spend an hour trying to figure out a math problem. Can’t do it? Move on. Raise the question with the study group/teacher at the next meeting. The partial credit is fine.
Agree with your comment, ski, but it takes a while for kids to figure this out. That’s what freshman year is all about.
(I always appreciate the time @gardenstategal takes to give really helpful and thorough responses. I almost always agree with them and think I should follow her example but never quite get there these days. Thanks GSG!)
If the kid is actually sitting at a desk from 7-10 pm, no phone, no chatting, no internet, and the student still needs to stay up until midnight to finish the work, then it is time to make an adjustment - help with study habits, reassess the level of the course (lower math class? help with how to write a paper?).
My daughter was really (I mean REALLY) slow at reading and doing work. In hs, she didn’t help things by having her phone ping every 5 minutes and taking time to answer. She did her best studying on Sunday mornings when all her friends were asleep. At college, she had study tables for 2+ hours every night and she buckled down and did work for 2 straight hours - no chatting, no phones, no breaks every 10 minutes for food or the bathroom.
We didn’t do BS but in my D’s college prep HS, the teachers seemed to always give more work in the beginning of the year. Part of it was to be sure the kids in the advanced classes were committed. There was always lots of movement down to regular courses in the first few weeks.
@gardenstategal Great points.
One of my kids is a perfectionist and that takes time!! One of my kids knows how to focus effort in a pinpoint fashion ( not always but mostly). I honestly try to discourage the A+ type thinking. Perfectionism takes away from real learning. The Kids can’t expect work to be returned in order to move to the next step.
Freshman year I think it’s honestly getting used to the school and realizing that top BS’s are filled with top kids. Students will only receive top grades if they are truly warranted. Some will stay up all night to get the grades and others will learn time management, etc.
Oh, I know. But it’s not me you need to tell; I’ve lived through it already. I’m just trying to read between the lines to look for possible reasons for the OP’s (or kid’'s) concern after 2 weeks.
Interesting comments. I agree that reaching out to an advisor can help a lot.
I also agree that schools misrepresent the amount of homework students normally get. I have a friend who teaches at Milton and a friend who teaches at Taft and they laugh at the mis-information about homework that is given out to potential students.
I also think that people responding should keep in mind that it’s very possible @dogsmama1997 actually does know her student and that said student is not lying about how they are spending their time at BS. I sometimes think people get a little over the top with the “well kids aren’t honest about …”
My older one had a similar experience, way more homework than we expected and no she wasn’t goofing around. ALL of the kids in her dorm the first two years stayed up way past lights out. Lights out was in fact a total joke. No one cared that the kids weren’t getting enough sleep. Schools also get blinders on and ignore the reality on the ground. After the first two years lights out wasn’t a thing so kids just stayed up to get stuff finished. LOL
I am puzzled by the number of parents who seem to think that it must be kids not using their time wisely and not that schools are just getting out of control with homework. I don’t think there is any reason for a highschool freshman to have more homework than a college student. I don’t think that is really “prep” for college, it’s just punishment. Maybe everyone else on CC has a kid who can do 3 hours of homework and get A’s. Both my kids are very bright (in totally different ways) and neither of them could do that at their schools. In addition to that (I polled them last night out of interest) they both said they don’t know anyone who only had three hours of homework on a consistant basis except maybe the one “genius.”
I’ve found my experience taking 3 honors STEM courses here that it’s not too bad of a workload–definitely a lot, but our block system helps so much with not being overwhelmed. I find myself having free time during study hours, honestly. I really hope your kid can get adjusted and maybe their workload will drop down as the year goes on, teachers relax, etc.
Their advisors, prefects, teachers, and deans can all provide a support system and help him to get through any issue!
