<p>I'm sorry that you don't believe me, edad. Given that so many of the schools in that profile enroll lots of students determined to take the most challenging curriculum (and it is offered there), the fact that I share information with these folks about comparative hours on homework, is quite believable to me. I'm talking about the high schools that parents go to great extremes to get their kids legally & illegally qualified to enter.</p>
<p>I guess the public and parochial HS in our area are even worse than we thought. We are on Long Island in a fairly nice suburban area. High school here generally rank a lot higher than most of the rest of NY State, but this is not a highly-academically oriented part of the country.</p>
<p>...and just to further elucidate. Parents are repeatedly told that 3-4 hrs. homework/night are standard for any level of private school or rigorous public, in FRESHMAN year. They are also told that classwork & homework demands are ratcheted up over the following h.s. years, so it's mathematically logical to me -- & given that AP's in <em>our</em> area anyway (unlike GFG's) are not offered freshman yr., regardless of the rigor of the school. A couple of schools offer <em>one</em> AP of choice in soph. year. To be admitted to such as a soph., it's a pretty high bar (straight A's without going into meltdown freshman yr.). That obviously means that, as per the usual across the country, for most students AP's & even many of the Honors classes are stacked into the last 2 yrs. of high school, when 5 hr. minimums tend to be the rule.</p>
<p>Yes, there may be the occasional 4-hr night in Jr. & Sr. years (because of activities, other commitments), but it wouldn't be the rule that with an advanced program, most people could get by with 4 hrs. & still maintain the highest GPA that such students desired for college admissions, given the competitive environments at those schools.</p>
<p>GFG...I wouldn't worry about your daughter not joining clubs...let her find her feet. She may join later in the year or next year...don't worry about it at all. Her friends will invite her to things and she'll be fine.
Some kids plunge into the rat race, not because of their parents (who might, like rats, want to jump ship), but because of school requirements and what their friends are doing. Every school in my area is rigorous. There are no exceptions. Even the non-honors track is rigorous. The son of a good friend left our school and went to a public school that is not highly "ranked" or whatever. She expected it to be quite reasonable... I just spoke with her and she told me that it's just the same there...the classes are demanding and hard and he's up very late. He's not in the honors lanes and he's a bright, hardworking kid. Go figure. It must be our area.</p>
<p>"I find it difficult to believe that the public HS's in your area require 5-6 hours of homework per night to excel and over 3 just to pass." </p>
<p>edad, that's the reality where we live too, though to pass you might get by with a little less than 3 hours, depending on if the student uses his study hall, etc. You can choose not to believe us, but why would we lie? I, for one, have no axe to grind. I don't need any excuses since my S did well, and won the admissions "prize." He fully expects that the workload at his Ivy League college will be easy compared to HS, or at least comparable. When I expressed caution about that optimistic view, he said "Mom, c'mon. How could it be harder?"</p>
<p>I sure I curious as to the part(s) of the country where public high schools have such demands. I lived a number of places and have not seen anything approaching those levels.</p>
<p>I just polled my CA friends: Bay Area (Silicon Valley), SF, Orinda, Marin.</p>
<p>I have close relatives in Marin County with kids in HS and just starting college. Maybe they are exceptions.</p>
<p>Don't know..my friend wants to know what high school your relatives go to so she can transfer her kids:) This, of course, presumes that kids are taking an average to above average course load and are academically oriented.</p>
<p>I cannot recall S needing 5-6 hours of homework per day in high school. Perhaps it was because he was always taking at least one college class, and these required homework to be returned one week later; so he used to spend one weekend afternoon and perhaps evening producing that homework. But the rest of the week, I believe he had a total of 3-4 hours at the maximum. He only took one AP per year besides the college class (es), and the non-AP classes did assign have much homework (in fact, too little in our opinion). There were, however, crunch times, when projects fell due pretty much at the same time. Aside from these crunch times, he was not at all overwhelmed by homework. But our high school was not one that had a competitive atmosphere, where everyone knew everyone else's SATs, GPAs, college list, etc...</p>
<p>Wow, these posts sure make me happy that I chose California public education for my kids. (the irony!) Like Midmo, I was astonished and dismayed at how little reading my kids were expected to do in their English classes. My son spent the first 3 years in high school studying something called "integrated science" -- only in his senior year was he actually able to take classes with names like "Chemistry" and "Physics"... and he was on the advanced track in his high school, which meant geometry in 9th grade, AP English in 11th. </p>
<p>My daughter was on an accidentally advanced track -- by mistake, she was assigned to a sophomore schedule when she started in 9th grade, placed in biology and geometry rather than earth science and algebra. On the advice of my son ("earth science is a total waste") she elected to keep those 10th grade classes. </p>
<p>Neither of my kids had an AP class before 11th grade, and as far as I know the schools they attended didn't offer them. It seems like the standard approach was no tracking in 9th grade, moving to "honors" courses in 10th grade, and on to APs in 11th & 12th. </p>
<p>And here is the irony: my d. is now at Barnard, taking half her classes at Columbia (an Ivy!). And they say that the ad coms know what they are doing when they admit a student; so far my minimally-prepared daughter seems to be doing o.k. </p>
<p>I think Bethievt is right: the "most challenging courseload" mantra has spun so far out of control that kids in academic magnets or private college prep schools are expected to take on courseload that is far more intense than what the colleges contemplate with that advice. "Most challenging" for my son made a lot of sense - the alternative was quite dumbed down and boring.</p>
<p>I also think that it also comes down a lot to Ivy-itis. I am sure that there must be many excellent, less selective colleges that would be delighted to accept kids coming from these academic preps with a more balanced courseload, and throw in merit awards as well. So the "buy-in" for the students and parents must be the path to Harvard. Where the kids will find themselves studying side-by-side with very bright kids from public schools in middle America who are lucky if they have the opportunity to take 2 APs. And with the push that the Ivies now profess to increase enrollment from lower income students, it is clear that the ad coms will be looking to get MORE kids coming from Podunk High ... because these AP-filled schedules are clearly an earmark of more affluent schools. </p>
<p>In the end, I really don't know what to say. I didn't choose public schooling for my kids with the idea that my daughter would end up on an Ivy campus ... I simply assumed from the start that those places were out of our league, and that the jewel in the crown of achievement for my kids would be 4 years at Berkeley. </p>
<p>I did spend most of my life dismayed at the overall quality of public schools in our state -- but the picture painted by TheGFG is worse -- it is madness, and worse than that, it is simply not developmentally appropriate. </p>
<p>Teenagers are older children, they are not young adults. Their brains are still developing. No matter how bright they may seem, they are simply not ready to integrate and utilize knowledge in the same way as a 20-year-old with a more fully matured frontal lobe. They certainly can do a LOT better than the typical California public curriculum, so I don't think that my kids' schools are a better model. I'm just saying that in hindsight, given the choice of too little or too much, I'm starting to realize that "too little" was better -- at least it didn't get in the way of my kids' ability to experience a healthy childhood. "Just right" would have been better still, of course.</p>
<p>I think one solution would be for the colleges to retreat from the "most demanding curriculum" advice to guidelines as to what would be expected from students at high schools that offer APs & honors track courses. So at a certain level it would be clear that there were no more brownie points to be had. </p>
<p>I know that the UC grade-weighting system is somewhat like this -there is a fairly moderate limit to how many AP's can be counted. (Maybe 4 total? I'd have to check for the actual limit). So a smart UC-bound kid can see that it is advantageous to take a certain number of AP's in their areas of interest, but that there is no reward in piling on the APs beyond the limit.</p>
<p>Tam.. HS, Mill Valley</p>
<p>Epiphany--I don't think we're on different pages here. That Yale grad is the first in probably fifteen years to go there; don't think there's been a Princeton in that time; not sure there's ever been a Harvard. Maybe 10 kids go to highly selective schools each year out of 400. Some 0thers that probably could go to the flagship or another good state school. My point is that for those who want to, and have the ability, it's doable from our school, without the stress associated with yours or GFG's.</p>
<p>We have a neighbor whose daughter worked real hard to get by in the local HS. We heard she used to work many hours every night. I have my doubts, but then again she was accepted by the community college.</p>
<p>Ah, our friends are further out...near Novato. I'll tell them to move to Mill Valley...:) Beautiful area...didn't know it was sane as well. Calmom...I know that a lot of California publics aren't great, but a lot are nutty..you must have heard about them...they are a stone's throw from Cal.</p>
<p>Now, edad, is that tongue in your cheek? You sound like my dad...when you visit your relatives, ask them about Lowell, Gunn, Paly, Saratoga, Monta Vista, Los Altos, just to name a few.</p>
<p>
Absolutely! I've posted on a different thread that older S had 5 -6 hours a night in senior year, more on weekends. He had 7 classes, including 5 APs. He has recently talked about how he disliked HS (we really didn't know) because of the excessive busy work. He never complained about the math and science classes, but the others were too much at times. </p>
<p>Younger S has 3 -4 hours per night, most nights. He has 7 classes, of which 3 are Honors and 3 are APs. I wish he had taken a lower level of English, but his GC really counselled against it. He has been reading "The Last of the Mohicans" for class and is assigned 5 chapters per night. I feel that it's too much. Last year he read something like 25 novels for English -- I know that because I cleaned up his room before school started and made a list. (Some of the schools S1 applied to asked for books read during previous few years.)</p>
<p>I think they should have more fun in HS. But I also think that S1's HS experience really prepared him to be successful in college, so I don't know what to think.</p>
<p>garland:
There are similarly about 10 students out of the ~400 in one of these local high-rent publics who go to selective colleges. But they do so at considerable physical cost & sacrifice, & with many advanced courses at graduation. OTOH, many advanced courses are <em>offered</em> at that school, so they dare not take merely "few" if they want to get recognized. There is, however, the occasional athletic recruit -- who may or may not be able to "coast" (or believe so), & who is contacted by colleges like Yale, who says in effect, 'keep doing what you're doing; you're basically guaranteed acceptance as a crew {for example} recruit.'</p>
<p>edad: I can attest to the nature of some affluent New Jersey suburbs in Morris, Mercer, and Middlesex counties. </p>
<p>How about this: for those of you in high schools which offer a moderate to full range of AP courses, let's take a poll about how many AP classes your bright sons and daughters took in HS or alternatively how many AP's the brightest children generally take. Maybe that will help illuminate the work load.</p>
<p>Mine took 13 AP's, scored 5 in all but AP Calc BC. (Several others of his classes were AP level and were either converted to an official AP the following year, and another was an actual college course taught at the HS. The remainder were all honors classes.) His friends had comparable schedules; some were heavier on the college math and had differential equations and prob. and stat, and some were lighter on the sciences and didn't take AP Physics BC, but all were in the same range.</p>
<p>Five chapters of Last of the Mohicans per night is a cure for insomnia. My kid is reading the works of Puritan women poets. Every poem they wrote. These are not great poets and after a few selections from each, one gets the general idea. "He wracked, he sacked, he sank the Armado."</p>