Wow, so not “EVERYONE” like she would like me to believe! This is a great website to come and compare notes!
I am not going to make a big deal of it though. HW accounts for just 5% of their grades and I don’t even think the teachers actually check them beyond marking that they’ve been handed in. In fact, her Calc BC hw is optional (heard it from the teacher himself at back to school night!)
Except for Chem labs, which I know are important but she writes them during class.
Sometimes these types of threads make me think my daughter is slow. She spends up to two hours writing up a chem lab, creating graphs in excel and pasting them in her notebook. Calculating r-squared, etc.
@VickiSoCal lol I hear you
Uh no, my kids don’t/didn’t cheat on their homework.
I would make a big deal of it. It’s not ok and that cavalier attitude could get her kicked out of college someday.
My D seems to be having a very different experience with AP courses than many here. She has a large amount of writing for AP LIT, a lot of translation for AP Latin, and a lot of concentrated reading and memorization for AP Bio. None of those to lend themselves well to being productive in transit or in short bursts, at least not for my D. I guess some could do Calc problems in shorts burst but she likes to set aside at least an hour block for Calc HW.
And straight A’s, that is quite rare at my D’s school. I think there are two with 4.0 UW GPAs out of over 600 seniors.
EC’s
Band - At least 12hrs but often up to 20 hrs a week during Marching season and 4 to 8 in Concert season
Private Music lessons (required for top band) -1 hour a week and at least 5 hours additional practice
Clubs - 2 hours a week if no scheduling conflicts
Service requirements for clubs and honor societies - averages to 1 hour a week
Work - 12 hours a week
Socializing - She is an introvert and gets her fill of socializing during Marching band
Your D’s experience sounds more like what happens at our high school. Getting a solid A in an AP class is quite difficult, especially in English or social studies where an essay is never perfect. Often there will be only 2 or 3 kids who earn an A- for the quarter, and the rest have lower grades. D has A LOT of reading and writing for her classes–even a requirement to read a certain number of pages on her own for English every night outside the required reading for class. No matter how bright or quick a student is, there’s no getting around the fact there’s a lot of homework. My older kids and their peers never got enough sleep. As I’ve written on here in the past, my son would show me on the computer that the future val and sal were up late right along with him, and they didn’t even do sports like S did. Their cohorts were highly motivated, disciplined kids who scored 2350-2400 on the old SAT and went on to Princeton, Columbia, MIT and other top schools. With my first high schooler I had initially worried he was not as smart as I had thought due to staying up so late, but then I really looked at the homework and realized it wasn’t him. I still stress over the fact that kids from our high school seem to have to do so much more to achieve the same transcript and resume as students from other schools.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Let’s not get off topic. Sharing HW (let’s just call it cheating because that’s what it is) has nothing remotely to do with the topic
When we moved into this school’s district we knew what we were in for; great ECs but high work loads and tough grading. The course rigor does not appear to deter involvement in ECs. The most of the top 10% students are also the most involved in ECs, especially the leadership positions. I do not know how they do it, but they leave with a strong work ethic (and sleep deprivation too I suppose).
Luckily for my D the colleges she is applying to know the school too. Our GC said the state Unis do not ask the school for CG letters or to mark the schedules as most rigorous. They know the school and the rigor and can make their own determinations.
I didn’t read all (or even most lol) of the responses but a few pages only…my rule was that the kids could do two non-academic ECs at any one time, not more than that. They could also work part time. My son who didn’t care for school much but managed honor roll always played football in the fall and baseball in the spring and did boyscouts as well as working part-time. My D who was a straight A, IB diploma student, was very involved in girl scouts (she earned her Gold Award) and usually was involved in a club or two at the school (peer tutoring, class VP, lots of fundraising things) but only worked one weekend day Sept/Oct and May/June at a job that she worked FT in the summers.
I insisted that we all eat dinner together as often as possible, at a reasonable hour, and this usually happened Mon-Thurs with the exception of baseball games. Family time was a priority over any ECs. Pretty much school nights were for homework and family time.
Edited to add: I just realized you were looking for number of hours for ECs. Including work, my son would be around 30 hours and my daughter, also including work during the shoulder seasons, I would estimate at less than 20 but she made up the difference in homework/study time 