Good to read your reply. Everyone has terrific suggestions for you. Make sure that he has plenty of regular kid time. Does he have a bicycle? Does he ride it? My 12 year old daughter plays soccer and just hangs with her friends in the neighborhood. When is the last time he had a sleepover? Most weekends there is another girl or two hanging out over here (and I am NOT tbe ‘cool mom’). He’ll be fine.
You can look up my high school. Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor MI.
Probably not dozens to strictly Ivy’s, though maybe a dozen. I was saying dozens for the Ivy+ (like Ivys, MIT, CMU, Chicago, Stanford). I don’t know all the numbers but I remember 4 from my graduating class went to Harvard.
It may be that he’s “hitting a wall” for the first time, if school was always too easy before and if this new school is providing challenging curriculum. Many kids NEVER hit a wall during gradeschool so college is a really rude awakening. IMHO it’s not good for kids to coast because they don’t learn how to study. It may take some time for him to adjust. Perfectly understandable and also very good! Support him during the transition and cheer him on, and he will learn very important lessons-that he can meet and overcome challenges, but also that you support him even as he struggles (that can be a scary experience for formerly perfect children).
When my older daughter (now 24) was in sixth grade, she had a teacher who was renowned, and not in a good way, for grading the students’ assignment notebooks. I will confess that I was among the parents who thought this was ridiculous. Well, maybe I was wrong. Sixth grade was the first year of school in which students were expected to be responsible for writing down homework assignments, doing them, and handing them in, without prompting from teachers. Organization was not and still isn’t my daughter’s strong point. If she could have mastered only one set of skills that year, keeping on top of assignments would have been the clear choice. She survived, and she is now, I’m proud to say, a college graduate. But a college graduate who still regularly misplaces things.
In 6th grade, a reasonable amount of time to spend on hw is 45mn. The rest of a kid’s time should be spent thinking, doing, experimenting - not just travel club sports, but non-pressure, non-competitive activities like driving a bike around, jumping into a pool, etc. Academic results in grades 6-8 don’t really matter. Just make sure he’s ready to start High School in the correct classes.
Remember that top colleges only expect 4-8 APs TOTAL from successful applicants, and 5 “core” classes each year (English, Math, Foreign Language, Social Science, Science). If you want to position your child for accelerated tracks, you can ask that he take Algebra 1 and a Foreign Language in middle school, and enroll him in AP Human Geography Freshman Year (to prepare him for “real” APs). As you can see… putting pressure on a 6th grader would be pointless.
It sounds like your son is attending a school that puts too much pressure on students.
Remember: colleges do not like “robot students” who are like studying machines and/or seem to conform to a parental ideal. They want kids who do things their way, take quirky classes they love as electives and don’t go full “everything but the kitchen sink” on APs, kids who found something they liked (be it collecting marbles or frog reproduction or the ukulele) and pursued it to the fullest extent of their abilities, initiative, and creativity, kids whose answer to “what did you do these last two summers” is actually interesting to read.
Our school district policy is 10 minutes times the grade…so a sixth grader would have 60 minutes of homework. Still far less than what this poster is reporting.
I joked once at a parent’s meeting at school, where some parents wanted more homework, that kids in middle school should just eat and sleep. This is a time of tremendous change- physical and social and emotional, with hormones raging and the peer group becoming very important. And the brain is literally being reconstructed. Schools that put a lot of pressure on kids this age,without recognition of this important developmental stage, are, in my opinion, potentially harmful.
This is also a time when motivation may transfer from the external- parents pushing for instance- to more internal motivation- such as interest, but there can be a gap of a few years between the two! And some don’t make that transition because the grading system is really another form of external motivation, versus learning itself.
I think you realize the problem is in you and that you have, yourself, an anxiety problem, possibly even an obsessive compulsive disorder. Seriously. You could try talking with a therapist. Try going cold turkey and don’t look at grades at all. You can tell if your son is working. You should also be able to tell if working as hard as this school wants him to, is healthy. Grades are not the end they are a means. Just promise yourself you will go a month without looking or mentioning grades. See what happens. Tell your son you are trying this for the sake of getting along with him.
I never looked at my kids’ report cards and they ended up at good colleges. Then again, when they were 12, I was more concerned with buying the right kind of Legos and some good books for them to read outside of school. Mercifully we moved to a town that had a school that did not overload with homework and my kids got to “eat and sleep” and grow during middle school, with an hour of homework and plenty of free time. We were lucky.
I agree - 3 hours/night is way too much for a 6th grader. But… is he really doing homework? He may be. Or he may be like a lot of other kids, staying in the room but not just doing schoolwork.
Also note that exercise is key. This kid may have been working less efficiently w/o the outlet of exercise. We had a situation with DD where I thought doing carpool was a good thing. But in retrospect, her 2.5 mile walk home from hs the prior year was probably helpful exercise after she aged out of the local soccer leagues.
Milburn is not a typical town. Population is 87% white, median household income in 2012 was $148,505 and the average house was almost a million dollars.
@mathmom, it’s even less typical when you factor in the shared government and school system with Short Hills. They share everything but a post office and a train station.
Which buttresses my point that it’s an impressive school, but when you consider the demographics …