To the OP: you are right to question this crazy system. I would encourage you to talk with your daughter about what is truly important her to her. Surely all of those classes are not 100% her passion. Dropping down to one regular or Honors class could give her a little breathing room and surely will not threaten her future career in college and beyond. Encourage her not to buy into the hype that she has to be in all AP classes.
To everyone who feels the crazy “busywork” of AP classes is absolutely necessary and truly prepares your child for college, I would argue it could be the opposite. College is hard and rigor in high school is no doubt a good preparation. But the work I saw associated with AP classes last year is not necessarily academic rigor…it was silly task work which took away from truly teaching kids how to take effective notes and study concepts and prepare for tests. It sounds like this varies by school, but Ds AP teachers were so caught up in requiring the insane hand written notes discussed above that it drowned out almost all effective and actual studying. What college class requires stacks of handwritten notes that are used for grades? None that I remember. You went to class, wrote a few papers and took maybe 3 tests per semester. If you didn’t do the reading, you usually performed poorly on the tests. No falling back on grades given for notes that artificially inflate your grade. You had time to actually study the material instead of focusing on turning in the tasks.
I would also argue that information she learned last year for her AP World test was no doubt “brain dumped” after class and the overall trends and political/economic concepts she should’ve been taught were lost in those daily tasks. She is in IB this year and the difference is just day and night. No one is babysitting her notes. She either does them or not. She gets no credit for turning in notes. Her grades are 100% quiz/essay and test dependent. She has time to learn the material…much like an actual college class.
The AP system at some schools is broken…with teachers who have confused rigor with tasks. I would argue that a lot of those kids are not being prepared for college. They are grinding through another day to turn in an insane amount of paperwork; being taught to do tasks that have no use in college and that are artificially inflating their grades in high school (i.e. you do not get grades for your reading notes in college) and not teaching or giving time to effectively study and embrace the concepts.
My D. was very busy in HS and continue to be very busy at college. She learned to multitask. Her outside of school sport practices (club) were taking about 3 hrs every day, she had Sunday off, but she also had lots of out of town meets and weekly HS meets. She also played piano and was taking private art classes, was HS newspaper editor, tutor kids at school and worked and volunteered during summers while still continue her other activities, the sport practices in a summer were two / day. I also had a rule - she had to be in bed by 10pm every day.
So, she did lots of her work over the weekend and most of work she did not do at home at all. I saw her doing primarily English and History, few times she had questions about her math and physics. The classes like Spanish, math, Chemistry were done at school. She was taking AP Calc in HS, she was done with Algebra in middle school.
By multitasking I meant that she learned to write her English papers in her head when she was not engaged in social activities during her long sport practices. Then she would just type them at home. However, as a perfectionist, she continue re-writing them forever. Then, I would just scream at her to leave it as is. Maybe you should limit your D.'s time doing something? It depend on a kid, but after some 5 or so re-writing of paper, it was obvious that it was not improving any more and it was time to stop.
In regard to dinners, there was no time for dinners, I was warming up her dinner in microwave at work and she was eating it mostly in a car, we did not have time to stop at drive in.
Anyway, I strongly believe that ECs are greatly improving kids lives and their grades. My D. definitely did not have 3 hours on the weekdays for her homework. But long projects were done over the weekends even if she had an out of town meet.
One thing to keep in mind that the college workload will be much heavier. Going over the material wile walking from class to class was a norm for my D. at college.
In middle school, sometimes teachers tried to coordinate exams and project due dates because it was possible due to the fact students were organized into community groups which rotated through the same classes and same teachers. That sort of accommodation can never happen in our high school since students are not even strictly organized into grades for their coursework. So often my D has three exams in one day, and there is nothing that can be done about it since all the kids in her classes have different schedules. I assume those who can arrange to spread out exams are in small, private schools?
carache12, please note that the OP’s D only has 2 AP’s and stll the workload is intense. This is not a case of a kid trying to load up on all AP’s as you suggest. And it does not sound like she is obsessing over the elite schools just yet, as she is only sophomore. So many posters keep assuming that the goal is an Ivy, and thus suggest that maybe the student needs to just give that up and settle for a top 50 instead. Seriously, can a student get into a top 50 school today by only taking 1 AP’ a year when others in his high school are taking many more?
Public high school here, but it seems to be a smaller cohort taking mostly honors/AP sections, even when the classes are not strictly organized by grade. The kids tell the teachers something on the order of “but that is when we have the big test in AP chem” and a due date is changed in AP Euro.
The dilemma of multiple projects falling due on the same day was a huge issue for one of mine in college, who did not get the memo that most peers, even those working hard, were taking no more than two or three difficult or time-consuming classes at a time, or that many were taking the easiest gen eds they could find rather than the most interesting, until it was too late to salvage GPA.
At least in high school, students taking a “most rigorous schedule” are taking roughly the same number of challenging classes, in roughly the same sequence, and could count on a weighted GPA. Colleges do not weight GPA for numbers of upper-level classes.
No, the game does not end once in college! If anything, elite colleges and honors colleges provide even more opportunity than a rigorous high school for students with a thirst for knowledge to overload or fall into classes before they are ready.
It can sometimes be difficult to find that sweet spot where there is “just enough” but not “too much” challenge.
@TheGFG …you are right! At Ds school there is nothing in between AP and regular classes, so I saw the Honors description and just assumed it was the same as AP? Is the workload lighter?
@MiamiDAP …part of me loves that your daughter can do all that and part of me thinks she will be the amazing CEO someday of a fantabulous company. Seriously. But then the mom part of me is sad to read your description about all the missed dinners, the dinners in the car. I love that you supported her that way but it just makes me sad for all those missed nights with the family. And learning information as you go from class to class? That’s great for classes that you will never need again but man, I hope she isn’t on track for a career where every.single.bit of that information is needed to function. I’m super glad I sat and spent hours and hours on Advanced Pathophysiology…my patients are very appreciative! I can’t imagine jamming little bits of info into my brain in between my classes because my attention was so diverted elsewhere with clubs and sports! Maybe others can learn that way, but that is just not me.
Alot of where we wind up is about choices. If one wants to play sports three hours per day and take music lessons for another hour or two per day that will make academics much more difficult in high school. There are only so many hours in a day. Our public high school was large enough so that there were multiple teachers for many of the AP classes such as bio and apush. My kid would try and arrange their schedule so they would get the best teachers. The same holds true for college. It makes lttle sense to take a college class whose psets take 25 hours per week. It seems like most kids in college choose their classes base in large part upon the teacher
I agree that it is absolutely about making choices, but I would add that sometimes it can be difficult to know how to make “informed choices” if information is difficult to access or even deliberately obscured.
It is also frustrating to realize that others who appear to be “doing it all” have lots of support behind the scenes that is not acknowledged in the hype that goes along with celebration of their accomplishments.
Chores are a part of life for those in certain socio-economic strata–not for all. We do all our own chores in this house, but I find that I am in the minority among friends and acquaintances since few of them clean their own houses, mow their own lawns, do their own taxes, wash and iron their H’s dress shirts, hand wash or home dry clean their delicates, cook dinner every night, and yes, tutor their own kids. I don’t know how middle class people afford it, but they seem to pay for a lot of the stuff that occupies my days.
carachel2,
“”…part of me loves that your daughter can do all that and part of me thinks she will be the amazing CEO someday of a fantabulous company. " - Sorry to disappoint you, she is an MD, graduated from Med. School this year.
"But then the mom part of me is sad to read your description about all the missed dinners, the dinners in the car. I love that you supported her that way but it just makes me sad for all those missed nights with the family. " - do not be sad for our family. We spent so much fun time together, staying at the hotels on her out of town meets, going to fancy vacations every year and ALWAYS taking her with us. She has traveled to so many exotic places in her young life that many much older people do not have a chance at all. She still loves to visit us at home, we always have a wonderful time together. She continued to have a very rewarding and extremely busy life at college and believe it or not was able to pile up some ECs even in Med. School. She just has very wide range of interests and very many very different friends. But all of us, including her (she is 26 y o now), believe that her personality developed because she was engaged in many different and unrelated activities her entire life that actually has helped her to achieve a very high academic level. She also was praised for her great bed manners by her superiors and patients many times over and her patients are also very appreciative and more so that she could speak their language if needed, as one of her ECs in Med. School was taking Medical Spanish outside of Med. School.
However, going back to the topic. As I mentioned before, kids got to learn how to manage their time in HS as college is much more work and at much higher academic level. Making plans (my D. still does it for every exam that she has to take) and sticking to them and multitasking is basically a must.
I rarely had that experience in HS, but when I did, I had a simple solution - I didn’t do it.
As others have mentioned, often one has to make choices. I could be a 3-season athlete or I could spend 7+ hours/week on busywork; I chose the former. If it tanked the 5% that HW contributed to the final grade, so be it. It just was not worth the aggravation and it didn’t hurt me in the college admissions process. Now if HW was 20% of the grade, I might have made a different decision.
Thinking about making choices and juggling activities. I attended a medium sized high school back in the Dark Ages. I was in a lot of activities, as were most of my friends, and took hard classes. Back then kids could dabble in more than one thing, like play on the football team AND be in marching band. There wasn’t the hyper specialization or the travel teams there are now, but kids were very very busy.
How did we do it?
I think we had less homework, number one. The culture does seem to have changed in a way that kids are supposed to be getting ahead by learning to do things earlier and working harder. We have less tolerance for kids just chilling. The other difference at least at my school was that teachers knew what was going on in kids’ lives. Teachers knew when there was a big football or basketball game and knew which kids were in sports, band, cheer, dance. They knew a Thursday ball game followed by a big test on Friday would be a disaster so they didn’t schedule that way. They knew, too, which kids had music competitions and speech tournaments and were ready to show some leniency with assignments.
I don’t see that so much now. Okay, my kids went to an enormous high school with more activities, and it would be much more difficult to know what was going on with every kid, but there are still certain activities that involve a large % of the student body. I think my kids had one teacher who was aware of the sports schedule and so was careful about timing his big tests— he had a son on the football team.
I don’t think teachers have to give kids a bye the day after a big game, but it would nice if there was more of a feeling of community and acknowledgment that kids have lives outside of school.
“I rarely had that experience in HS, but when I did, I had a simple solution - I didn’t do it.” - And you still got an A even though you did not do your homework? Well, many teachers will not award you with A if homework is not done. And many students who aim at A in every single class, will not risk it by not doing the homework. So, may not work for many who always strive to achieve an A
US med schools, perhaps some of the most challenging schools to gain admission, care a great deal about grades overall and in premed reqs, standardized testing, personal qualities, interviews, but do not put a lot of weight as to college course rigor, whereas some hs kids, at least on CC, are spending insane hours taking the most rigorous courses/schedules to get into college. Does this seem odd? A little bit of me believes that this is because APs/USNWR are incredible money making marketing ploys .
When S took APUSH, he was required to read 5-7 pages of text a night, 5 question quiz every AM, periodic practice AP exam. In over 15 years teacher had only 3 kids get below 3. S stated his teacher taught other teachers how to read/grade AP exams in summer. Example of teacher who knew how to distill material down to what’s important.
Our school’s AP history teachers also served as AP graders.I think this gave our students an additional advantage. Almost unheard of for a student to get below a 4 on the exam.
@MiamiDAP …that’s awesome! Different kids and families are wired differently and it sounds like your D did amazingly well with all that she loved to do. My D just doesn’t learn on the run and does not thrive on being insanely busy. We’ve done the hotel thing at club volleyball tournaments and always got back feeling crazy frazzled and not like we had spent wonderful family time together. Sounds like for your D it was a great experience. We do amazing vacations together also but we thrive on time together on the weekends and dinner at least 2-3 nights per week.
I still say the system is sort of broken. I just can’t imagine that we need to teach our kids that working 14-18 hours per day is the norm and what it takes to get ahead in life.
IIRC, I got an A-. As I said, choices had to made and that was mine. Not having a full night’s sleep was not an option. If the grading rubric were different, perhaps I would have made a different choice.
If the grading rubric were different, perhaps I would have made a different choice.