D’s school is doing just that very seriously! Freshman don’t get to take AP courses. D is kind of an uncommon student though. She got a pass by having A in community college courses in virtually all core subjects and even majority of electives.
Ironically, her non-AP high school courses are often as challenging as or even more so than her community college courses. Well, except in Visual Art, which was her specialty.
Looking at more of my old high school’s course listings, it looks like most of the honors and AP courses have prerequisites of B in the honors prerequisite or A in the non-honors prerequisite.
Seems like a simple way to regulate entry into honors and AP courses so that the students in them are the ones best suited to take them.
My son wanted to skip lunch his junior year. We tried to talk him out of it. Ultimately, the additional class he wanted to take didn’t fit with his schedule so he didn’t do it. He did skip lunch his senior year. Worked out fine. He wasn’t stressed out. He had time for friends, clubs, other activities, downtime (though in his free time he likes to code), etc. He wasn’t up until late at night studying (really at all much less every night). Why did he do it? Because he wanted to. He enjoyed the classes.
I have known some kids who get stressed out with 1 or 2 AP classes. I have known kids who were not stressed out with 5-6 AP classes. Its important to find a balance that works for the individual. But what may work for one person doesn’t work for all.
One issue I have seen with the math sequences is does the school offer sufficient classes for more acceleration. Assuming you take BC as a junior, what will you take your senior year? Some high schools offer multivariable calc. Some offer it at a nearby college. Though that often presents scheduling issues. Some schools do not offer anything (in house or at nearby college) beyond BC. At that point, kid needs to decide if they want to go without a math class (other than AP stats) their senior year. If you will be taking more math in college, you may well want some type of advanced math class your senior year of high school. That is why I see a lot of kids taking both AB and BC even though they likely could have gone directly into BC.
@SwimmingDad, I no longer believe in focusing high school years for top college admission. It’s just not cost efficient. That said, being accepted by Penn would be a huge honor and benefit. How do you tell if a kid is self-directed? I know mine is now, but it only started this year. I didn’t know what it means to be self-directed until last year. Or I thought I knew but now I know I was wrong. But how can you tell with just a short interview?
Interesting thread that illustrates that the fact that we parents want the best for our children, but we’re not always sure how to provide it. I have 3 children that attend (or attended) one of the schools mentioned in the article, although not Naperville North. 2 took more than 10 AP classes and did fine. They did sports and clubs and slept 7-8 hours per night. There is no earthly way my 3rd could or would want to follow this track. That’s okay. We’re trying to find the best path for him much as we did for the other two.
There is so much variation between children and high schools that the best path will be different. That’s why we discuss it in a thread like this one but can’t reach a single prescription. A few things do seem clear though.
If children are asking for help and saying something has to change, like the author of the original post from Naperville North, believe them! It’s our job as parents, perhaps with the help of mental health professionals, to help them figure out what change will help.
Having a goal of just a few colleges will cause more stress. Just by arithmetic, as all the top colleges say, there are many more well-qualified applicants than spots at HYPS etc. You can get a world-class education at hundreds if not thousands of colleges in the US. Take a flyer at the top tiers if you can afford the application fee, but don’t build your entire dream of your future on only one path.
We do have to play in the world we have and not the world we want. I do understand that there are benefits beyond prestige at HYPS, but we can’t all attend. Better teachers might gravitate toward the AP classes because they have access to more prepared students, but we might not be well-prepared enough. We can also take a risk and change levels down if it doesn’t work (at least at my children’s school.) Yes, our classmates might be taking higher-level classes or getting better grades, but that doesn’t make us a failure!
We can’t all be #1 or top 10% but that’s okay. 90% of us will not be in the top 10%. We parents really need to understand that. We can then help our children understand that.
@saillakeerie So true. Also, it matters more how much mastery of Calc they get than how fast they clear Calc BC, if they are going into Calc intensive majors. With so much grade inflation, getting an A or even scoring 5 doesn’t necessarily mean masterly.
Perhaps there is another angle to overworked and overstressed high school students.
That is the common high school grading scale of 90%/80%/70% = A/B/C (or similar).
What it means is that at least 70% of the assignments and tests must be easier problems that C students can handle, while a much smaller percentage can be challenging problems for B and A students. This can result in the “busywork for the sake of busywork” phenomenon, at least from the point of view of B and A students (who are most likely to want to go to college immediately after high school graduation). The C students may also find it stressful, due to the easier problems sometimes being hard for them.
A 4-credit semester-long college course would nominally need 12 hours per week of work (including both in-class and out-of-class time), or 180 (= 12 * 15) hours over the 15-week semester. In theory, a high school AP course that covers the same material over a year would require 180 hours of work, or 6 hours of work per week for each of the 30 weeks. Since high school classes typically have about 4 hours of class time per week, that means that the out-of-class time (homework, reading) should be about 2 hours per week.
Of course, those “heavy” high school AP courses that try to cover a year’s worth of college course material (e.g. calculus BC, US history, biology) would need to have workloads comparable to college courses. If they have 4 hours of class time per week, then they would have 8 hours of out-of-class time per week.
Obviously, workloads can vary by student abilities in each subject. But if every high school course (other than “heavy” AP courses) has significantly more than 6 total hours per week of work (or more than 2 hours of homework and reading out-of-class per week), then there may be “busywork for the sake of busywork” problem there.
Forgot to mention in #246 that non-AP high school courses also appear to be half the speed or lower compared to college courses. For example, year-long high school math courses below calculus cover material equivalent to semester-long remedial math courses in college. A year of high school foreign language is usually seen as approximately equivalent to a semester of college foreign language, though there can be significant variation between various high schools and colleges. High school history and science courses may cover similar topics as college versions, but at much less depth.
So, in theory, a typical non-AP high school course should be about 6 hours of work per week on average, like a “light” AP course, which means 2 hours of out-of-class work per week on average after counting the 4 hours of in-class time per week that is typical. A significantly higher workload may indicate “busywork for the sake of busywork”.
Issue with “on average” is similar to the average cost of attendance. Not helpful if you are significantly above (or even below) the average.
Surprised that lunch is not a standard (unnumbered) period that happens every day and in everyone’s schedule. So no classes are taught and it’s also the only time a lot of clubs can meet since they can’t meet after school if anyone is interested in a club and a sport. Also a lot of schools have a 20-minute brunch, again not numbered that everyone has to take. The other thing that schools are doing now is not starting earlier than 8 and I think California may make that a state law, at least for public schools. So lunch, brunch, class at 8 should all help in lessening some of the stress. Parents should try to advocate for this if their high schools don’t have it now.
Our high school is too big to have everyone take lunch at the same time. There are 2 lunch periods and as it is many upperclassmen leave campus for lunch because there is not enough room in the cafeteria or time for everyone who buys lunch to get through the line. A single lunch period is not practical in a large high school. Never heard of a “brunch” period either in our area.
Lunch here is about 35 minutes and you either have first lunch followed by period 4B or Period 4A followed by second lunch. There is no way to take an extra class during lunch. We have 6 periods a day, the only way to take an extra class is to take zero period.
Is this new? My kids went to a public high school in Cal and there was a ‘zero’ period that started at like 6:30 am. Very popular with athletes who wanted to take the last period, 7th, as their sport so that they could start practice about 2:30. Also popular for kids who wanted to finish the day early to go to work in the early afternoon. Some of the classes that were also a club, like journalism/newspaper met at that time. This school had very limited bus service (only from camp pendleton) so wasn’t dependent on bus schedules; when we moved to Florida the high school started at 9:15 because the same buses took the jr. high kids, then elementary, then high school and reversed the order in the afternoon.
Our schools have a 30-minute lunch that happens between 4th and 5th period. There are no classes during lunch.
For folks who are perplexed about how an entire high school population can fit in the cafeteria, realize that at many California HSs the students eat outdoors and the cafeteria is mainly used for serving food and the subset of students who want to eat there.
Many California HSs also do not have interior hallways. The classrooms open directly to the outdoors.
Clubs also happen at lunchtime at our HS, so a number of students eat in classrooms. If it rains, I guess additional classrooms are available or students can eat under the overhangs surrounding classroom blocks.
@theloniusmonk and @twoinanddone The bill to move HS start times to 8:30 or later in California appears to have passed in the Senate but failed in the Assembly. The bill exempted “zero period” from this start time.
and
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billVotesClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB328
We don’t have a cafeteria. The kids do not go inside during lunch at all. There’s windows where food is bought at.
If it rains they huddle in some of the covered lunch table areas and breeze ways.
Our last measurable rain was over 6 months ago.
Enjoying reading what lunch is like in California. Wouldn’t fly in winter in NJ. 20 degrees or lower, 2 feet of snow…
From the link by @Ynotgo in post #254:
What are the surfing team needs and agricultural needs? My blood is boiling.
Surfing team need to practice when it is light out, around the tides. Agricultural needs are seasonal. Our school in the Midwest did have kids who took a couple of weeks in the fall but the whole school did not. But there were a LOT of kids who missed this Thanksgiving week to go deer hunting. The school did not schedule a break but it might as well have as more than half the students were out for the week.
It would not have made sense for our state, that did have ‘city kids’ who did not farm or hunt, to have one school schedule for everyone. In California it would make less sense to have one schedule for high schools to all go to school 8:30 to 3 when in some areas it makes more sense to have classes begin earlier, go longer on some days, be closed on other days.
Why do you care, @coolweather , what time other districts start or dismiss school? My kids started classes at 9:15 and I thought it was ridiculous but they got used to it and I was at work before they even got out of bed so it really didn’t change anything in my life.
^ Some middle schools start at 7:30 AM, some starts at 7:45 AM. My kid’s HS starts at 8:05 AM. None of the kids do anything related to surfing or agriculture.