FWIW, my kid found the lessons and practice for orchestra to be rather demanding. It might look different from the outside.
But it was good that the structure of the day didn’t force a decision between sports and music. This is one of the advantages of BS. But there is an expectation that this privilege also involves certain obligations on the student’s part. You don’t show up for either unprepared!
Not talking about orchestra or any kind of ensemble. Kids can take singing or an instrument instead of art, that only requires one “class meeting” per week and the “homework” is less than the major art projects.
Art and music classes, at least the way they were handled at my kids’ BS, are very much considered “academic” classes. They are not a cakewalk and are approached very seriously. You need effort and talent to get a good grade just like you need effort and talent to max out your grade in math and other classes.
I think this is really a crapshoot as some of these arts electives are fun and not really time consuming at all and some are a huge time suck. Much like with sports, lots of kids do intramural sports that just meet twice a week or fun things like rock climbing or farming for 4 hours a week. And then you have kids playing varsity and JV with practices and games 6 days a week, often traveling to games 1-2 hours each way. So I think it is good to figure out how to balance if one of the two is time suck.
BTW this is not something unique to boarding school, my non-BS kid also played in the orchestra and sang in the choir while playing two varsity sports. Even our publics allow this as music rehearsals tend to be before school or during lunch period. Unless do you marching band which is another level of time suck (but kids seem to love it regardless).
I took music lessons for most of my life. Once a week. But the expectation was that I would practice at least an hour a day between lessons.
The feeling of going to a lesson unprepared is one I can bring back quite easily. Not good! Nowhere to hide and never any good excuses. And since these generally led up to a performance at some point, the unpleasantness of the upcoming lesson was layered with general anxiety about the looming concert/jury/recital.
I seriously doubt that kids who see their music teacher weekly play only then. It’s hard to imagine any teacher putting up with that.
But we digress…
Music takes up a lot of time. Practice alone can be up to an hour a day especially if kids have been playing a long time. I just counted up my kids classes and there are seven ( six really plus one P/F seminar which has taken up as much time as any other class). Had no idea it was 7 until now. Art also takes up a good amount of time (less than math but more than just going to the class). Art is no walk in the park. Few get A’s without serious work and talent.
What’s a “P/F Seminar”?
P/F = Pass/Fail
Mercersburg is quite attentive to maintaining what may be called an appropriate work-life balance, but there is room for individual variation. My daughter chose to take more classes and to work more intensely on them than my son. She stayed up late doing homework. She still does. He didn’t and doesn’t. She did very slightly better in high school and in the college admission wars, but both are happy and thriving at great schools. She continues to take too many classes and sleep too few hours, and he continues to get everything done efficiently and still get his 8 hours of sleep. It’s how they are.
Andover’s 2019 State of the Academy report is a very interesting document: average daily homework is 4 hours (down from 4.2 in 2018), and average daily sleep is 6.8 hours. Kudos to Phillips Academy for doing this and making it transparent. The 93.5% student response rate (over 1,000 students) is tremendous.
Here is another twist on the homework/time question. My kiddo and friends @BS typically have 4 hrs of work per night/day. Most schools have dedicated study hours at night. However, kids do learn to manage their time during the day to kick start the homework. Some of the work gets done during “free periods”. Is it an equal amount of homework time for classes? No. Some classes may involve more work and some classes may be more challenging for your kiddo - and that means it will take more time.
Here is the good news: If your kiddo is @ BS, you are no longer wasting hours each day (for us it was > 3) driving to school, sports, EC’s, performing arts, etc. So, the time your kiddo spends on homework seems to be more focused and actually more manageable than it might have been at the local school.
My kid does homework in the library in order to focus and not get distracted. I also learned from my sophomore that the last 5% of the work takes the most time. So the amount of homework is going to depend on the course load and the grade the kid is hoping to achieve. I’ve been told there are kids who don’t do nearly as much.
Four hours sounds about right. Heavy course load with APs and honors and a dedicated student. Can be more or slightly less. This year seems to be about learning how to study and manage various school projects given a busy schedule.