<p>I feel really bad for everyone that has an insane amount of homework every night. Freshman year I don’t really remember doing any homework at home, I finished it all in class. Sophomore year was maybe 1/2 an hour to an hour of homework a day. Last year, as a junior, I had an hour to two hours on a typical day. I guess that doesn’t count studying because I never really studied for any of my classes, even the APs. </p>
<p>I’m hoping senior year is just as painless!</p>
<p>Freshmen year:</p>
<p>Debate: 10-20 mins per night at most [practice speaking, writing speeches, memorizing]</p>
<p>Spanish: 10 mins max [workbook and vocab] + 10 for studying </p>
<p>English: 30-40 mins max; usually did most in class [vocab, writing, thinking outside the box] + 1 hour for studying</p>
<p>History: 1-2 hrs easily (crazy teacher who called us adults) [notes and worksheets] + 2 hours studying</p>
<p>Physics: 10 mins max [worksheet] + 1 hour of studying </p>
<p>Biology: 10 mins max [worksheet] + 2 hours of studying</p>
<p>Pre Calculus: 45 mins [problems from book] + 20 mins of studying</p>
<p>I would have 4-5 hours per night because obviously I wouldn’t have a test in every class everyday. Note every class was honors except for debate. Next year I’m taking 5 APs and 2 honors. I am so screwed.</p>
<p>In all honesty, I think that just working straight through homework on any schedule with no distractions would yield about three hours max. However, it is practically mentally impossible for any human, let alone a teenager, hold that degree of concentration for a prolonged period of time, so the mind easily finds diversions, which extends it to 5-6 hours.
Either way, it’s extremely stupid and insensitive to the growing experience of adolescence.</p>
<p>Not saying it isn’t possible, but I rarely had this much work on one day that wasn’t due to procrastination or excessive Facebook / Cracked usage. I also was in a variety of IB and AP classes throughout my high school years. When 6+ hours of work was involved it was mostly because I did a week’s worth of bookwork for my dual-enroll multivar calc class.</p>
<p>Don’t stress out about it too much. If you start your homework when you get home and do most of it soon after it was due, you shouldn’t be staying up past midnight. If you are too busy from EC’s + IB + curing cancer then I suggest you see Cal Newport for a reevaluation of your priorities. High school is only as hard as you make it.</p>
<p>I went to a very large and competitive public high school (In my year around 30 kids went to Ivies including myself and another 70-100 went to other top colleges) and when I was in high school I felt like I was always doing homework. Even after doing a lot of it during my free periods, I would spend at least another 3 hours at home. When I got to college, I realized how silly it is for a school to assign that much homework. There is definitely a point of diminishing returns. Since your in school all the time, you really do not have as much time to absorb things if you are given that much busy work to do. I think it’s perfectly possible to have an average of 2 hours a night, varying by case, and still receive the same benefit as having 4 hours.
Well over half of my homework in high school was busy work and even though I have always been an incredibly intellectually curious person I always resented having to do so much homework. It felt like we were beating the meaning out of everything, classic literature, math, chemistry (doing thirty of the same stoichiometry problems). Sometimes I came to despise amazing works because we spent so much time digging them apart that the book could not speak for itself. Now that I’m in college, I don’t mind doing my work at all. It’s not a burden because they’ve thrown out 90% of that busy work and increased amount of work that actually has intrinsic value. Instead of doing 30 identical chemistry problems a night or two (less a few changes in the wording of each), my weekly physics problem sets were usually less than ten problems, each being thought provoking and unique.</p>
<p>Unless I have a report or project due the next day, I never spend more than two hours a night on homework. With a couple of exceptions, my teachers are all pretty demanding. I go to an elite private school, and took 3 AP classes junior year. However, I’m also an extremely fast reader. While most of my classmates take an hour or two to finish the assigned reading for APUSH, I usually take under fifteen minutes without skimming/skipping. It’s a skill that’s been honed for many, many years- or, almost as long as I’ve been alive anyways.</p>
<p>Seriously though, I think most people are exaggerating. I don’t doubt that those in 7 AP’s have to pull all-nighters sometimes, but not as frequently as they’d have you believe. In my school (or at least among my nerdy AP friends) having a GPA higher than your average hours of sleep is a badge of honor. I’ve never gotten anything less than 6 hours of sleep a night though during the school week, and not because I’m a slacker (4.4 GPA, two 5’s, and a 4 :().</p>
<p>You just need to learn how to balance out your homework and not procrastinate (much). Form study groups, and if you don’t get a subject, seek out a teacher. Don’t spend too much time on something you don’t understand, like a math problem. If you truly don’t get it, leave it till the morning when you can seek out a friend. </p>
<p>Good luck in HS!</p>
<p>Easily. 2 hours on regular assignments, 3 hours studying.</p>
<p>IB Grad speaking - On some nights, you’re -lucky- if you only get 5-6 hours. And by the way, I’m not counting study time.</p>
<p>It wasn’t too unusual for my teachers to assign one or two papers (3 to 5 pages on average) plus 100-300 pages of reading every week, and that was just in English and History. Throw in the occasional 20-hour lab write-up, in-class presentation, and a couple hundred math problems, and life quickly becomes hectic. (Somewhat scarily, I think my homework load was actually kind of light for an IB student. It doesn’t begin to compare with what my sister had in college.)</p>
<p>Typically, though, I’d say the homework load was about 3-4 hours per night on slow weeks. During busy periods, I’ve pulled as many as 3 all-nighters in one week. (That’s actually probably because I was so sleep-deprived that I wasn’t being productive enough anymore.)</p>
<p>Having said that, it also depends on the quality of work that you do, your efficiency, and how much of your homework you do. Most students in my IB programme (myself included) quickly decided that they weren’t going to do all the homework and reading.</p>
<p>^ That’s what SparkNotes is for. I haven’t actually read an assigned book for school since like middle school.</p>
<p>I went to boarding school and can say that 3 hours of homework was a light night. A typical weekday night was 7 or 8 - midnight of work, while Sundays (we had class Saturday) was noon until 10 pm for homework.</p>
<p>It depends on who you are. If you have an excellent memory you might be able to just sit in lectures, skim through books, and scan your notes and be good for an A on a test. If you are a fast learner you could start your assignments during lessons (depending on how the class is structured) and be done before your leave, regardless of how hard the class is. I know that so far it’s worked for me and I don’t see it failing any time soon.</p>
<p>@penguin369 how is that even possible?? How do you do it?? Teach me I beg of you !!!</p>
<p>Yeah, how can you read 4-8 times faster than your peers at an elite private school…</p>
<p>It definitely comes down to two things; your school, and your habits.</p>
<p>My school is highly highly competitive, and straight As are the norn. So, teachers will assign busywork papers and projects in every class, from bio to history to Japanese, to make the AP courses more ‘realistically rigorous’.</p>
<p>As a huge procrastinator, I never started hw until 7pm. Bad idea, cause all that time on the PC till 7 meant working till 3AM… And testing which teachers allowed me to doze off.</p>
<p>I can only offer a few things. Do your hw as early as possible, starting with the small stuff. Put the cellphone in a drawer, and close your Internet browsers. Open them hourly for brief breaks. You should be able to sleep before Midnight. And if your school library stays open after school, STAY. You’re even more motivated to get the hell out.</p>
<p>If you have psychotic, over-assigning teachers (plural for me), then get into project and study groups AT school, not someone’s house. Group effort makes time fly.</p>
<p>Follow those steps and both problems will be gone.</p>
<p>People are so full of it… I have never had more than 3 hours of homework a day… Through high school, college, or graduate school.</p>
<p>Sure you can always waste time and do too much, or try to get ahead, but why not just do the assignment when you need to and go on about your day?</p>
<p>^ Dude, you don’t have the same teachers as half of us. You probably don’t study as much as half of us either…</p>
<p>^ I am sure that is a correct assumption.</p>
<p>It depends on your HS. I take the hardest course load possible, and I get A’s averaging <1 hour homework per night. Occasionally I do entire projects or papers overnight, but that’s only a few times a year.</p>
<p>@BowTie That’s funny because in different threads since May 2011 you have claimed to be in college, having a daughter, and now having graduated from grad school.</p>
<p>You enroll in the IB Program, take a heavy course load, do all your ec’s, volunteering, competitions, athletics, music practice. It starts to add up.</p>