Frustrated re amount of homework - quit fabulous classes to keep kid's (and my sanity???)

Parents Forum
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Fascinating thread that I plan to read, though I haven’t read all the posts yet. The school I am familiar with tried to address the issue you describe, of teens being at the edge of a health cliff, while trying to do what you describe. They instructed their faculty to reduce the homework load, and there are signs that this has been done, to a small extent. They asked faculty to rethink whether the loads they were requiring were reasonable, and some faculty did decide that they could cut down on some work (though others didn’t).

The overall load, though, and the school stated so, can’t be fixed by the school alone. The activities you describe (including her sport) require a significant commitment to be successful, certainly, and event to be merely competent. Some students in that situation take lower course loads (and, potentially, summer courses). Others are just comfortable with a higher level of stress, business, and with less free time.

For many of us, to get enough sleep, take care of our emotional and physical health, requires doing less. There’s no magical method of making everything fit. Kids have to decide which is more important and allocate their resources in a way that works for them.

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@JustOneDad …Ok, I can’t tell how to take your comment! Are you saying 14 hr + days @ age 16 are needed to avoid mediocrity in life?

Or are you saying that by teaching kids this is the norm and encouraging this kind of schedule and buying into the hype is what leads to mediocrity?

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99% of kids AREN’T doing this in high school, and an awful lot of them will still do just fine in life. My kids respectively had 3.6 and 3.7 GPAs in high school. D1 went to a 2nd tier LAC, graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and has been very successful in the working world for the past few years. D2 is attending a school that is crazy hard work, but she knew that going in and really wanted that challenging college experience (and she sure isn’t spending her time outlining for homework points). Both were very busy and challenged in high school, but not to the crazy level some of the students described here are. Neither picked the highest ranked college they were admitted to, either.

Of the four NMFs in D2’s class, one went to Michigan Tech, and is happily working his way through the engineering curriculum there. The second took a big scholarship to our state flagship, and is doing fine. D2 went of to her beloved crazy-challenging (but not top ranked) school. The fourth decided to ED to Reed, and from what i hear is thriving there.

I believe that ALL these students will “get ahead in life”, and NONE of them had perfect grades in HS or took an insane schedule. It is only the crazy idea that one MUST be competitive for a top 10-15 school that drives this whole cycle.

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YMMV

My kids took the courses because they wanted to. They chose the EC’s that interested them, whether or not they were “stars.” Some other parents even thought I was crazy to allow my three season athlete to participate in sports when others were obviously performing at a much higher level, but I was ok so long as grades did not fall below a B and the coaches seemed reasonable.

We did not even begin to think about colleges until after junior year was over and test scores and grades were in. Even so, one did not end up applying to a single “top 20” school (visited a few, did not like them), and ended up going to the least selective school on the list, although for a challenging major in the honors college. And this was still a research university within the “top 80.”

They wanted to learn the material in the classes, heard good things about the teachers, and liked the idea of having classes with most of their friends, even though some of these (but not all) seemed unduly obsessed with college rankings. They each found a couple of their AP’s kind of boring, because they learned quickly and/or had a good background in the material, and their teachers were happy to quietly provide optional work to supplement.

Many students, including my own, participated in academic competitions that were much more challenging than classwork or homework, for the added stimulation and socialization.Everyone did not get a medal, or did not get a medal every time. Other classes were more challenging to them and in a few cases they were pleased to get a B and qualify to remain in the top track the following year.

Whether they will end up “getting ahead” in life, who knows? Both have had ups and downs since graduation, that had nothing to do with their quality of work or work ethic.

But this was several years ago, and I will confess that if I were a parent of a college bound kid today reading this forum, I would be persuaded to become more rather than less intrusive in the college selection process, leaving much less up to luck and happenstance, and would have helicoptered much, much more, mostly by using tips learned on this board and relaying them to my kids.

I do think that there is the sense that education and employment have become more competitive for “regular people”, that destiny is written in stone at a younger age than previously, and that it has become tougher to recover from set-backs if not merely more expensive, and that this drives some of the urgency.

For OP - at the end of the day, you know your kid best, and at least while she is under your roof you should have a good sense of whether demands are not reasonable, and whether the solution to her high stress level is to dial back the demands or encourage her to learn better coping and perhaps time management, or a little of each.

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@MiamiDAP, I find that very sad, and I think many here would agree that they don’t want their family lives to follow that path, no matter what kind of medical superstar gets produced at the end. It certainly would never have been permitted in my family.

I don’t think the normal college workload is at all heavier than the craziness OP describes. Because college students have so many fewer classroom hours than high school students and have no EC’s that they feel they must participate in, they have considerable free time and are able to manage their obligations much more easily.

Composing papers in her head while participating in other activities was also the norm for your D. She is highly unusual in her behavior, verging on obsessive, and her experience cannot be generalized whatsoever. See is obviously uniquely talented and accomplished, so holding her and your family’s experience up as an example to OP and others is really of no value and only encourages the kind of frantic pursuit of perfection that OP describes as threatening her daughter’s and her own sanity.

If family life is suffering or if a child isn’t getting enough sleep or is missing out on a social life in the dogged pursuit of getting the “best” high school record, something needs to be adjusted. In twenty years, that child will enjoy a level of personal happiness–high or low-- that will have nothing to do with how many AP’s classes she took or how many EC’s she participated in. Please folks, get some perspective.

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@mathyone - No, it doesn’t come cheaply but I live in an area where parents can afford this kind of thing. As a result, the classes get harder, the the kids who can afford the help get a grade boost versus the kids who can’t, a fair amount get into tippy top schools, the high school gets highly ranked, and the whole thing just keeps perpetuating itself. For those of us who are well off but not that well off, or having ethical issues with paying others to do our kids’ work…well, sometimes we think our still very bright kids would have been better off in a district where this kind of thing doesn’t happen, highly-ranked school or not.

I guess one bright spot in all this is that most kids from our district say college is easier than high school was.

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As I read this thread I can’t help but think of all the complaints on CC about the “unfair advantage” athletes have in college admissions.

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Well, Sue22, if a kid can be a top athlete AND a top student at a high school like ours, then he is truly exceptional. Besides, any boost recruited athletes get is only available to an elite group of very talented kids in certain sports, and often only at the highest ranked Div. 1 schools. When 75% of the student body is an athlete at a small Div III LAC, there is no way they are lowering the academic standards for athletes. They simply can’t, or their rankings will decline. As you also know, the Ivies have joined together into a league with strict recruiting guidelines/bands that do not allow for much lowering of standards either. Yes, it happens, but at D’s elite school no one got recruited with less than an 1800 SAT, and that was only if you were a potential conference champion. So that was only one kid out of every recruiting class. Everyone else with more modest athletic accomplishments needed the same scores and GPA as all the other regular students. Achieving that as an athlete is not easy with the level of AP homework this thread is discussing.

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To the OP: Skimming this thread it’s easy to see that schools and AP classes can differ greatly, when it comes to expectations and rigor. Students are individuals with varying ability levels and capacity. Determining what is reasonable based on your values seems like the best course of action.

The only thing I would add is to talk and listen to other parents who have similar aspirations and values. Something I think our district does really well, is to facilitate the exchange of information. They hold parent nights at school where they bring in speakers. The district has informal Q and A’s from “experienced” parents. The district even invites recent grads back for lunchroom “what it’s like in college” exchanges. Community involvement is encouraged.

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@TheGFG,
I’m in complete agreement. I was commenting on the irony of complaints about how elite athletes “have it easy” when we can see from threads like this how much of a strain the pursuit of even modest athletics places on students who are also enrolled in tough academic classes.

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“sometimes we think our still very bright kids would have been better off in a district where this kind of thing doesn’t happen, highly-ranked school or not.” Perhaps. But the grass is always greener. When my daughter was in middle school she learned about schools where the academic opportunities would have been a lot better for her, where she would have had a lot of like-minded peers, and she said “why can’t I go to a school like that?” I do agree that your school sounds like it has bought into an overly competitive culture where advanced academics but not so much learning is what is valued and where kids are pressured rather than excited about the entire thing. Wouldn’t it be nice if communities could find a good middle ground?

Nearly every day, my daughter came home from high school happy/excited about something she was doing or learning. Yes, there were problems with some of the academics and peers were too few and far between but she liked school and she chose the challenges, was not pressured into it by some kind of one-upsmanship or thought that she “had” to take or do something or else she wouldn’t get into some elite college. There was no “game”. There was a kid who loved to learn, determined to get the most out of her years at that school.

I understand the skepticism about the outlining and to some extent I share it, but my kids say it’s worth it because the process of doing it is how they learn the material. I actually had a college professor in a tough STEM class recommend that students recopy their notes and it was not bad advice. These survey/intro history classes have a large amount of factual material in them. Many people look down on breadth over depth, but I think there is too much emphasis on “depth” in education which leads to kids having no idea what the big picture is or how their tiny topic relates to the field of knowledge. Personally, I think depth is the easy part. And do not underestimate their total lack of contextual knowledge. I recall my daughter saying she was the only kid in her AP world class who knew what the crusades were. There is plenty of room for depth in subsequent classes beyond the first intro.

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My D’s were both in drama and were always leads which gave them even more rehearsal time. Which meant that from January through April they were in school from 7:20 am to about 8:30/ 9:00pm. No lunch breaks or study breaks–9 period instructional schedules. About 45 minutes for dinner each day in the middle of rehearsal time. There were also Saturday rehearsals from 9am to 3pm.

Somehow older D managed to be Belle in Beauty and the Beast, the president of her school and graduated in the top 5% of her school. Most days she stayed up until 12:30 am doing hw and got about 6 hours of sleep.

But to be honest, she would not have changed any of it. Sure it was stressful, but she learned to challenge herself, juggle things, keep a sense of humor and strive to be her best.

I went through the same experience with younger D, who did all the theatre stuff and was putting together an art portfolio at the same time.

I know as parents we want to fix things for our kids, but it seems that if the OP’s student is ready to do hw by 7pm or so, it is no big deal.

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When my kids were in elementary school if the homework took much longer than it should have, I just wrote a note to the teacher and said mathson spent two hours on homework that is only supposed to last 40 minutes (for 4th grade), so I told him to stop. For these schools with too much busy work, I’d do the work that seems worthwhile first. However many math problems for you to feel confident. Reading the text book, but not outlining. Whatever. And I’d keep careful track of my time. Then I’d ask for an appointment with the teacher and tell them how much time their work really takes. If you can get some friends to join you, so much the better. I know in elementary school, I didn’t do this often, but really teachers had no clue sometimes that what they were asking for couldn’t be done in the time allotted. (And my kids were well above average, so if mine couldn’t do it, probably lots of others couldn’t either.)

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The worst were the mandatory elementary school science fair projects completed at home.

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At my 9th grader’s back to school night one of the teachers admitted that she’d tried doing the homework for her own class and after finding out that it took more time than she’d originally thought had cut back on the work she was assigning. At this school the policy is that kids are supposed to contact the teacher if the assignment is confusing or takes longer than expected, the idea being that they can’t whine about the work being too hard if no one is telling the teacher so he/she can do something about it. I have already seen one teacher modify an assignment after getting negative feedback from the kids. I like this policy because it puts the responsibility squarely in the student’s hand to help solve the problem instead of suffering passively. Of course it only works if the teacher/administration truly mean what they say.

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GIven the title of this thread and the folllowing quote from OP's first post, it seems like the situation is quite a big deal. I have to assume OP didn't t start this thread because everything was hunky dory.
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@frazzled2thecore, the science projects marked the beginning of both our kids not doing assignments. Not turning in
assignments, as opposed to not doing them well but turning something in, probably cost S16 making NMF this year. The bottom line is that neither likes school and will probably never make the grades they’re capable of. As long as they end up self suporting and happy I don’t have a huge problem with that. Some folks need to push themselves to the limit, some don’t. I don’t know that either way is inherently superior to the other. I’m glad they merely dislike school; my feelings probably crossed the line into hate.

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Elementary school science projects were awful time sucks. My D avoided honors science classes in high school so she wouldn’t have to do projects. I know and she knows that in high school it’s different but still, it’s a bad association.

We were all quite sick of accelerated reader too. My kids had to do it through sophomore year. And honors kids had to get more points, so it was more of a time suck. I think that was a factor in D dropping down to regular English as a junior rather than doing AP.

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I’m a little surprised to see AR used at the high school level.

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It doesn’t seem like many high schools use AR. In both middle school and high school my kids were really limited by the fact that schools required books to be at their reading level. AR reading levels are beyond stupid (most Faulkner novels are rated as elementary and I think it’s As I Lay Dying that’s rated lower level than House at Pooh Corner). So it became harder to find books.

On tip of that, overly popular books were declared off limits. Then in the last year or two my D did it they had to do a certain number of nonfiction books and they also had to pick books that had vocabulary quizzes which not many did. The quizzes were really odd. One of them included the word fudge. Really? This book is deemed highl school level but you think the kids don’t know what fudge is?