@intparent gets a thumb’s-up for a reference to “The Trial” in a thread about anxiety and stress!
We live in a Grade School district and a High School District which is the biggest in Illinois. The grade school district had a Magnet program so kids back in third grade were advanced 2 years in Math. The sequence led to BC sophomore year. I believe she is the only one at her high school that is a sophomore but the other junior highs that feeds into the other two high schools have more sophomores taking BC.
Some of the stuff here is ridiculous. You don’t need to buy into it, and you need to think very carefully what is going on.
Our HS does not allow freshmen to take AP classes. No exceptions.
Sophomores are permitted to take APUSH1 (depending on grades in 9th grade European History class, either honors or CP, not AP), AP Art History, and AP Comp Sci (if they took a CP level comp sci class as a freshman). No exceptions.
Things open up for juniors, but strict prerequisites apply. For example, you are not allowed to take AP Chem or AP Physics unless you are concurrently taking calc (or have passed it already). No exceptions.
For any AP class, you must meet prerequisites based on coursework/grades. These are spelled out on the school website. You can’t just sign up for an AP class because you want to. You need to demonstrate that you can handle the coursework.
If you sign up for an AP class, you must take the exam. You and the parents sign a contract. No taking an AP class to pad your resume.
My son, who is a STEM kid, is a senior. His GC recommended that instead of taking AP Spanish/Psych/Econ etc, he take an honors level engineering course. She said she would be sure to explain in her recommendation why the choice to forego another AP class was made–because too many engineering students have never done hands on work.
Last year our HS sent 7 kids to ivy league schools.
Some kids can handle the workload–that’s great. But if yours can’t is it worth risking their mental health?
@eastcoast101 Some of the stuff here is ridiculous. You don’t need to buy into it, and you need to think very carefully what is going on.
Our HS does not allow freshmen to take AP classes. No exceptions.
That’s awesome that your HS takes a healthy approach to AP classes, but students are measured against the students in their HS. So class rank is based on weighted GPA and rigor is determined by how many AP’s you take - both of these factors are important to selective colleges. Our school is the exact opposite of your school - they wave prerequisites to allow kids to take more AP’s. If you have the misfortune of living in TX then you have to be in the 10% of your class to be admitted to A&M or 6% for UT. So there are lot of kids who are forced into this rat race just to attend their state flagships. If I were in charge of our school system I would 100% change our school system to something similar to what you and @intparent have. However, I am a minority in my district in my belief that this AP race is crazy. I can only manage my own children and help them navigate the environment they are in. My children are doing well, because I have vetoed the GC and I have shown them many colleges that they will easily be able to attend so they don’t have to have anxiety over acceptances. We spend a lot of time talking about being the best you, you can be and that measuring yourself against someone else is not a good standard.
If I was obsessed with GPA I would move my kid to the non-honors track at her school. Instead we made the decision, with her and her g.c, to leave her in the AP/honors track where she gets mostly Bs. It is where her friends from the elementary GATE program are and where the discussion and learning level meet her needs. The non-honors track at a high school that is well over 60 percent below poverty level with most kids not going on to 4 year colleges is not the right place for her. A kid who has passionate discussions in AP Euro about her favorite English monarch and who memorized every monarch in fourth grade just because would be the weird kid in regular World History. So she gets a B in Euro and she’s happy. Oh well.
My son graduated with Tessa from the article and obviously was immersed in the situation during his high school years. While there is a lot of truth in the article there are some items where “artistic license” has been taken.
The item I have an issue with is the statements around suicide. Yes there were multiple suicides in the high school last year and yes this is concerning. The reality of the situation is that at least half of the suicides did not have to do with academic pressure, they were due to legal issues and bullying. These deaths are still awful however when the original essay was written, the suicide that was most referenced (occurred just before the essay was written) was due to a legal problem and had nothing to do with academic pressure. The author was well aware of this (as was everyone in the school) but ignored that fact because it did not fit her agenda.
The reality of the school is you are either a have or a have not however not in the traditional sense. This distinction comes down to the academic rigor you are pursuing. Those that were identified (through the ACT Explore exam) in 8th grade as the “most likely to succeed” are given the world in terms of academic help, guidance, etc. and the others are left to their own devices. My son was one of the others and to see the difference in support between he and his friends was shocking.
My son took no AP courses and took a fairly typical schedule with 4 years math, 3 science, 4 English, etc. and was a 3 sport athlete. He graduated with roughly a 3.0 and as a result was in the bottom 25% of his class (although the school does not rank). We were relatively happy with his achievements as after the 8th grade explore exam we were told he would never go to college (CC would be a remote maybe) and should start looking at tech programs (in 8th grade). The school gave him no academic support and we had to fight to get him into the classes we knew he needed to overcome a single standardized test when he was 13 years old.
Fast forward to the college search and my son with a mid 20s ACT and a 3.0gpa was given almost no support. He had one meeting with his GC and when she asked for his list of schools/plans he presented a list of state flagships around the midwest encompassing the Big Ten and Big Twelve conferences. The GC supported none of those options, dissuaded him from applying to any of them as they were too big a reach and would only support application to the local CC. In contrast to this, he had friends that not only were encouraged, but almost required to apply to Ivys and were convinced that they were a lock at an Ivy, even though we knew their stats, while good, were not even close.
Once acceptances started rolling in my son ended up the happiest of the bunch as he was accepted to all of the schools he really wanted and proved the GC wrong. The bulk of his friends were disappointed and really struggled emotionally last spring. None got in to an Ivy, which they had been assured at least one would happen for everyone in the group. Given this pressure, suddenly UIUC acceptance was seen as a failure as were other top schools (Michigan, Duke, Notre Dame, etc.). At this point the GC stepped in again and pushed all of these kids, with great stats, and acceptance to some top schools, to play the money game and go to Alabama since the school mindset has become “if you can’t go to an Ivy or an Academy, then the school really doesn’t matter, go where you will save the most money.”
Each year the school puts out a list of the colleges where the prior year senior class matriculated. I have studied it each year and before last year’s experience found it odd that the school that had by far the highest attendance rate (larger than I believe the entire Big Ten combined) was the local CC. This is not a financial decision in most cases and I now know that it is steering from the GC, if you do not fit the profile of what they think will get you into an Ivy, they push CC and those that do not know any better follow the expert’s advice.
Just this week, post mid-terms, my son commented to me how much easier the coursework is at his Big Ten school considering his struggles in high school. This is a good thing with his high school and the academic approach they have taken. A student they did not see exceeding is thriving in large part because of the rigor they had in place, in the general coursework in the high school. This is a good thing and is paying dividends now but only because my wife and I had the knowledge to work around the high school and go against their recommendations, most kids are not as fortunate and likely end up in programs below where they should be. This is the real problem with these high intensity high expectation high schools, if you don’t hit their criteria they wash their hands of your future.
In the local school district, shifting from AP to non-AP classes would not reduce the workload noticeably. The reason that homework tends to be so time consuming is not intellectual. Rather, it’s the “production” element. The non-AP classes tend to have even more of that: posters, videos, production of objects, group projects, building projects (Rube Goldberg devices), clay models . . . Admittedly, I did not hear of dioramas, but their existence as an assignment would not surprise me at all. For example, students in one of the history classes had to create a museum-style artifact, which could not involve photos. The older sister of QMP’s friend built a bustle. Students in the economics class had to design a game that involved economic principles. The same older sister was fed up at that point, and designed a game about selling blubber to the Eskimos. Even the AP Chem class had a building project after the AP exam–a Rube Goldberg device. I’m having a hard time recalling the required initial power source.
Videos to be produced by a group take a long time. There was an interview on NPR yesterday with the creators of Stranger Things, in which they commented that they had developed good videography by high school, so that when group projects were assigned, people wanted to be their friends, but then they dropped them after that. They mentioned a video recreating of the storming of Normandy (set at a local lake), that was shown in the school for about 10 years after they produced it. Since there is actual video of the actual Normandy landing, I see no real merit in showing this for so long, unless the context was a discussion of “fake news” and how to detect it. But I think that most “fake news” is subtler than a shaky video of a group of high school students on a lake.
Another element of this is that only a few students have enough real video experience to make the production of videos faster than average. They are going to be in high demand and the groups without them are going to need a long time.
(More to follow, but this is getting long.)
One of the most egregious examples locally was the required Rube Goldberg project in 8th grade. The instruction sheet told the students to work on it at times when their parents could help them. (The expectation of parental help was explicit.) This had to have components with all of the simple machines. QMP got to use a drill for the first time while working on it. A few of QMP’s really great ideas had to be left on the drawing board for lack of mechanical skill in the family. A friend’s family built a large-scale device in their garage (think bowling balls, among other objects), and they all stayed up until about 3 am the night before it was due, working on it. My only solace during this project, which occupied our study for about a month, was that the teachers had younger children in the school system, so I knew that eventually the teachers’ kids would also have to do it. But when the teachers’ kids started reaching eighth grade, suddenly this project became optional. (Maybe the oldest of those kids had the experience, and then it was stopped.)
I think in a lot of cases, the teachers just do not realize how long the assignments take in practice.
There are additional complicating factors in this. Locally, the fraction of “points” during a semester that come from the tests and quizzes is comparatively low. That means that it is difficult for a student to just skip the project homework, understand the material, test perfectly, and score higher than about a B-. When you read about students who just skip the homework, you may be visualizing the type, amount, and weighting of homework that was assigned back in your school days, and thinking that the student is just lazy. Not so now, at least around here.
Could a student just skip the homework, and settle for a string of B- grades? Yes, but that would put the student below the admissions bar for the better public universities in the state. Take a look at the public universities in your state that currently admit students with a 2.7 UW GPA. If you have a good community college system in your state, please bear in mind that this is not a universal feature across states.
So should a student be encouraged to skip homework, totally aside from the issue of college admissions? I view it as an assigned responsibility that really ought to be met. But I admit that this view may be dysfunctional.
Couldn’t agree more with the article. I have a senior and a freshman. My daughter is applying to colleges now and just told me she thinks she is depressed, that’s she’s cried everyday for a week because she is so stressed with essays and such. My son, a freshman, was just diagnosed with a high IQ but low processing speed that is causing him huge problems with geometry. He thinks he’s going to not get into college because he’ll probably end up with a B in the class. It’s so out of hand that I’m most likely going to change his schedule next semester(their school is on the block system.) And yes, here at CC it’s easy to think every kid graduates with 10APs and 3 or 4 DE classes. It’s crazy!
I would not make such rigid recommendations, since students may have different strengths and interests.
Here are some suggestions, for a student at a high school where various AP courses are offered as more rigorous options:
- English: typically honors substitutions for regular English courses. Choose if student is strong in English and likes it.
- Calculus: typically for students on a +1 or more advanced math track (completing precalculus 11th grade or earlier). Obviously determined by students' middle school math placement.
- Statistics: typically an elective.
- Sciences: often a second year option, occasionally an honors substitution. Student should complete biology, chemistry, and physics (not necessarily AP) in high school; choose AP science if the student likes it. Environmental science is typically an elective, unless it is required for high school graduation.
- Computer science: typically an elective; for most students, CS principles is more useful in terms of knowledge learned than CS A.
- Foreign language: typically level 4 or 5 is designated as AP, so students who reach that level will take the AP course.
- History and other social studies: sometimes an honors substitution (e.g. US history, US government), sometimes an elective. Choose AP if the student likes history or whatever subject.
- Art: typically an elective, but may be an honors substitution if art is required for high school graduation or college admission. Choose AP if the student likes art.
Obviously, few students like and are strong in all of the above areas. Perhaps the “pressure” that is being discussed is the pressure from parents, peers, counselors, etc. to excel at the AP level everywhere in order to get into an elite college, rather than choose just those in areas where the student most likes the subject and is strongest, knowing that a college like Rutgers or some such is a perfectly good place to go.
Note that it is best not to choose elective APs if they displace core college prep courses like precalculus, the three main sciences, level 3 or 4 of foreign language, etc… However, high school students typically have some elective space in their schedules beyond the typical base college prep curriculum.
ANYONE can go to a community college. With passing grades MOST of those can transfer to a 4 year college or university. And with that college or university degree get a pretty decent job.
No tests, no ECs, not even very academic high school classes are required for the above.
Take a broad view, and you discover American kids have considerably less to be stressed about than their counterparts in much of the world.
@iaparent “The reality of the school is you are either a have or a have not however not in the traditional sense. This distinction comes down to the academic rigor you are pursuing. Those that were identified (through the ACT Explore exam) in 8th grade as the “most likely to succeed” are given the world in terms of academic help, guidance, etc. and the others are left to their own devices. My son was one of the others and to see the difference in support between he and his friends was shocking.”
Thank you for your input, this is exactly how are school operates too. When our GC tracked my son in 9th grade she was ecstatic - she had him scheduled with 15 AP’s. Whenever my son wanted something he got it from her. On the other hand DD was only above average and not exceptional - DD remarked she will do nothing for me. GC got less cooperative with DS as DH & I changed those AP’s to regular classes and it became clear he would not be an Ivy contender.
Here is an example of the haves and have not in our school. When D was a freshman a classmate was becoming rather aggressive with a group of DD’s friends. He had kicked one and shoved another at school for some perceive slight or joke he felt was at his expense. Those two times the girls hit back so it could not be reported or else they would have gotten in trouble. The third time he shoved a girl so hard that she fell back and hit her head on the locker - DD reported him through our reporting system. Even though they had video evidence and my DD’s and my testimony that this kid had a serious aggression issue - he was given lunch suspension for 3 days and it was not put on his record. He was exceptional and they could not ruin his chances. If he had been non-exceptional, I’m pretty sure charges would have been filed and the kid suspended from school.
@Dad2020
It seems reasonable if she is able to do it while keeping her grades up. Smart to keep it to 5 regular classes per semester. Honestly, I would add a study hall or a PE, if you can. That would make it easier to keep her grades up.
Why don’t they have pre-calc between trig and AP Calc BC? I am not familiar with that sequence.
Do they offer Multivariable Calculus for Juniors? That would be more beneficial than AP STAT.
Senior year looks like a lot of AP’s but the ones she has there are not very difficult. I would consider the other CS AP with Java.
She may not know whether she wants to be a STEM kid, but to keep that option open, students need to continue to take math and science until they are certain that they are not STEM kids. You want to keep that option open to them. The more English, math, and science will never be a bad thing, as long as they can manage it without being overwhelmed. All of this will make college easier and avoid some of the freshman weed out courses much more manageable.
Our high school district is in this article. The stress is real. And not imposed by us. Yes, some parents are putting the stress on their kids to succeed and take a crazy amount of AP classes. We’ve tried so hard to be a reality check for our S19 and our D21 but it’s still hard. When you’ve got a very bright child and the classes they belong in are honors and AP, it doesn’t make sense to take a “regular” class. We tried it freshman year with our S19. He played two sports at the time and we knew he needed balance. He was so bored in the regular classes. Teachers gave little homework and he never had to study and got high As. It was kind of a waste. As for taking APs only where you have interest, that makes sense. In S19’s case, though, he honestly likes all of the subjects. He’s very well rounded and is a good writer as well as a strong math and science student.
Fast forward to junior year. We insisted he wait on AP Physics because it is a beast at our school. He taking BC Calc, AP Lang, APUSH, Honors Earth Science, Honors French, and Honors Art classes. His AP classes are amazing. Seriously, the teachers are caring and smart. I sat in on classes yesterday since it was a Parents Day at school. I was nothing but impressed. They care deeply about the stress on the kids and want them to learn for the sake of learning. BUT, and this is a big but, S19 has tons of homework and the classes move very quickly. There’s no way around it. I’m sure these teachers would rather teach honors levels instead of AP but they are not offered for these junior classes (meaning there is no honors American History or honors English for junior year). I’m sure they feel forced to get through the curriculum so that kids get good grades on APs. Parents in our district expect it.
We also have zero grade inflation at our school. No one has a 4.0 in all honors and AP. These classes are hard. The school insists that our kids find college easier than high school and I’ve heard from a number of parents that this is true.
Our S19 does not keep his phone near him when he does homework. He gets home from his ECs (year round) at 5:45, eats dinner, and gets to work. He’s usually got 5-6 hours of homework. Homework is good homework, no busy work. Lots of reading and writing. I haven’t seen an assignment yet that seems like a waste of time. Last weekend, the kids had to read the Frederick Douglass book and fill out a long packet about the reading. It was assigned on Thursday and was due on Tuesday. There was really no way to do it earlier since there’s an hour of APUSH reading/note taking every night and this assignment was on top of the regular homework. Add 40 pages of Scarlet Letter reading each night, 75 minutes of calc homework, reading and reading checks in Earth Science…well you get the drift.
I don’t know the answer. He is learning at ton. And some weeks are worse than others. This last week has been particularly stressful with APUSH and AP Lang having big assignments due and a quiz and a test in BC Calc. S19 is very good at managing his time. Never misses an assignment. It’s just a ton of work. I wish they could get buy with just a little less homework…
Easier in terms of amount of work, versus intellectual challenge?
My kid’s GPA wasn’t high - 3.7 UW. She was unhooked – Caucasian female from a reasonably populated state, no athletic hook, not a legacy anyplace she applied. And she had better admission results than her class val and sal. Oh, and she took a study hall during some of her most intense EC quarters, too.
I stand by the argument that GPA and class rank are not the keys to college admission success (again, save in those states with GPA driven access to state schools). Colleges need to know the student can do the work. A 3.7 UW or above in a fairly rigorous course of study and strong test scores let them know that. Then it becomes more about intangibles. Colleges are dying to find students who are genuine – genuinely curious, genuinely creative, accomplished in interesting areas, and a little different from the crowd. It takes some courage to be that student and that parent. Continuing to claw your way up the same mountain as everyone else (same APs, same school activities) is a choice and a strategy.-- but it isn’t the only one you have.
@ucbalumnus Yes. Less work. Or at least they understood how to manage their time and were ready to contribute on campus day one. Many have said they were just more prepared than the other kids they met freshman year in college.
Our S19 has been to class at Carleton and Grinnell on visits and both times said they were just like his classes at school and that he didn’t feel intimidated at all. They are definitely intellectually challenged at our high school and highly prepared for college classes.
The pre- calculus is with Algebra 2 before the Trig/Calc A. She does have PE every year. They do have Multivariable for Juniors and actually an Independent Study for Seniors. Her classes aren’t officially picked for next year yet. The multivariable has been a bit of a discussion. She always maintained a lack of STEM interest since junior high and did not take any PLTW classes then as many of her classmates did. Her science interest has gone up in high school while math has gone down. Things could changed but I would bet against it.
@intparent “Continuing to claw your way up the same mountain as everyone else (same APs, same school activities) is a choice and a strategy.-- but it isn’t the only one you have.”
I completely agree with that. It’s why I veto GC’s class schedules. However, the problem is that many kids either have no parental involvement when it comes to selecting their course of study and go with what the other kids on their track are doing or what the GC tells them or parents who think that the clawing is the way to go. I worry about those kids. I think we need a cultural change and your school is on the right track. My kids & I get flack because of our choices for balance. DD dares to take more than the required art electives when she has no plans to pursue art as a career- art every year in place of AP’s unimaginable. I have been told to have her drop art classes for other AP’s/accelerated classes. My son has taken debate class all four years to mentor novice debaters instead of taking more AP’s like he was originally scheduled. Both of my kids are well rounded, because we insisted on balance. They go to bed at a reasonable hour and don’t spend hours up all night studying. I wish every kid had this chance.