@doschicos - Actually, my D is very susceptible to motion sickness. Definitely have pulled over many times but somehow she managed to re-train herself, especially if she was using her school ipad. Regular books seem harder for her in the car/bus.
Parents are often the worst offenders here. Our school has a policy to schedule only 5 academic classes for the incoming 9th graders for the first grading period. This is to help the kids adjust to boarding school and figure things out. Sounded great to me. Yet at parents meeting with our form dean during move-in, one of the first questions was why does their kid have all these free periods and that they are not paying for their student to be lazy and lay in bed instead of learning. Bunch of other parents chimed in and started pressing for the process to petition the sixth academic class right off the bat. I was pretty speechless.
Honestly, I cannot see encouraging a child with motion sickness to study in the car. There is talk here of schools demanding too much. IMO, if your child is a day student and is getting physically sick from studying on the commute, it is your job to step in and discourage it. Find another solution to getting homework done.
Itās also a parentās job to tell their kids going to a highly competitive school where all students are high achievers that the goal doesnāt need to be all As. Being a B student is fine. It really is.
For those day student parents worried about their kidsā workload and time management this early in the year, I respectfully suggest pulling back a little and not keeping track of every assignment/quiz, etc. Remember that there are plenty of boarding students at your childās school that are going it alone without parental involvement and oversight on a daily or even weekly or monthly basis.
For our kid who had a half hour commute and couldnāt study in the car the solution she worked out for herself was to eat at school, giving her time to socialize, study for a few hours at school, use the car ride home as a break or time to chat with the parent driver, then finish up work at home.
I concur with those who have noted that the pressure (and worry) often seems to originate with parents rather than the schools and trickles down to our kids in the many innocent ways we encourage them to always work toward their personal bests. In the context of school, kids interpret those signals to mean earning and preserving a top GPA, but they add a corollary āwhatever it takes (sleep be damned).ā In the case of new BS students, they have just gone through the stress and pressure of a very competitive application process where they have been sifted and weighed. Once on the new campus among similar cherry-picked peers, itās hard not to feel the need to keep pedaling hard. For better or worse, thatās the way most of these kids are wired. As @cinnamon1212 pointed out, these are not āaverage kids.ā They will do whatever they feel it takes, no matter how many hours per day, to stay on top. In their minds, failure is not an option and, unfortunately, many consider anything less than an A to be a failure. This message is not coming from the boarding schools. It was ingrained much earlier and many schools are trying to counter the damaging effects of the self-imposed grind while preserving the studentās spirit and encouraging the resilience and risk taking they will need to be successful in college and beyond.
Last year, on the main board, there was a thread entitled āWhat Straight-A Students Get Wrongā that discussed the effects of this misguided pressure. I responded there how Choate acknowledged the issue and what they are trying to do about it:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/21856227#Comment_21856227
Itās hard to counter the lifetime narrative that has our kids believing that somehow their self-worth, adult approval, and life success is tied to a school or a report card. Many of the schools are trying but, first, we parents need to make it OK, really OK, for our kids to āfail,ā get a B, take a risk, miss a shot, be number two (or three or fifty).
Yes, @doschicos, it really IS.
I have to say that ābeing a B student is fineā sounds reasonable and healthy, but . . . I spend a lot of time over on the college admissions side. We are in California, and according to @gumbymom, āUCās are very GPA focused so below a 4.0 will be tough.ā Our āstate flagshipsā are UCs, and my D isnāt too interested in the CSUs. To be a competitive applicant, it seems a high GPA is important. My D doesnāt have a 4.0, more like a 3.5, so . . . how to reconcile ābeing a B student is fineā with also having affordable college options is difficult for me.
I have no direct expertise in UCs as my kids didnāt apply but I do know B students who attend/attended UCs from my kidsā school. I think B students from a typical public high school would be a challenge but for the selective and challenging boarding schools, I think universities understand the rigor and lack of grade inflation. My guess is it would depend on the rigor of the high school.
My older kid applied and was accepted to Cal and UCLA with less than perfect GPA, however it was solidly in the A range (3.8 or so, from competitive private). UC application rounds the grades, so anything from A+ to A- is reported and counted as A, while anything in the B-range is reported as B. This worked great for my mostly A- student, would be a disaster for B+ student. Other competitive state flagships do the same thing, University of Michigan among them. So if your kid is borderline in some classes it is worthwhile to put in the effort get over the hump to the A-range. UCLA gets 100K applications so they really canāt spend much time analyzing how competitive the high school the applicant is coming from is. That said, there are a lot of UC campuses that are less competitive than the two flagships.
The CC offices at the schools talked about most on this forum have relationships with the readers and admissions offices at these colleges, and the readers absolutely DO know the boarding schools and how to evaluate their students in the context of each. There is a back-and-forth between boarding schools and colleges that is part of their historic relationships and part of the benefit of attending them. I am not suggesting any feeder relationship; those days are long over, but applications from these boarding school pools absolutely are āanalyzedā appropriately by the colleges, and GCs are actively and effectively advocating for their students to the colleges. B students coming from boarding schools do very well with the colleges they apply to.
Agree with @ChoatieMom and along those lines, if a parent has any questions about a specific school or group of schools (UCs), talk to the college counseling office at their school.
I agree with others that you are signing up for a certain type of environment when you attend one of the top boarding schools. Yet another reason it is so important to consider fit. Iāve mentioned many times that my top student kid decided on the ālesserā school because said kid wanted to do other activities. In hindsight, this was an excellent choice. There are other kids who did the same and the academics in the top schools are pretty stellar.
Is the #1 school really better than the #3 school or #10 school? Doubtful. We could see the writing on the wall during revisits. It was really the parents who persuaded us away from the ānameā school. They were asking hovering questions and their kids had already been admitted.
There are stellar kids at all these schools. Homework should not be taking endless hours as a Freshman( unless the kid is getting adjusted as a Freshman, the classes are too hard for a particular kid, or the kid needs help in some areas as mentioned reading etc). If your kid canāt keep up in every class and get an A, thatās ok. Kids need to learn they are not the best in everything anymore. And for every kid that is in the top 10%, there is a kid who is in the bottom 10%. Yep, thatās the math. The parents of the kids at the bottom of a class have expectations too.
Kids who do sports seem to have a better time understanding this as they have ālostā and have seen others who are at a higher level (especially when they are Freshman). Kids seem to be very stressed because their parents are stressed.
We are all paying big $$ for BS, but that doesnāt mean the school is run to our needs. The school is run to educate the students and make them self reliant. Iām glad. I was so tired of kids in my kids old schools jumping into the highest level classes on parental recommendations and slooowing the classes waaay down. My kids then sat twiddling their thumbs. Honors and advanced classes are great. They have a tempo and thatās why many parents pay big $$ to send their kids to BS. These parents have desires too ( like their kids being challenged for once). BS are better than public at not caving into parental desires for their kids to be in the highest level classes if they donāt belong there. ( at least that is what we have seen data set of 1).
Iām of the opinion that kids need to decide whatās most important to them ( with guidance). Do they want to get a perfect 4.0, do sports or a major EC? Do they want to attend a name school? Or go with something else? What motivates them to be happy and still working hard?
My nascent understanding on the UC admissions system is that it really doesnāt allow an opportunity for personalized input from CCs like other schools do. They have their own way of doing weighted GPAs, and they use test scores. It is very formulaic. They factor in the school (not sure how much), but LoRs are not even required, unless they specifically ask for one. UCs are an entirely different ball of wax.
And the boarding schools understand that different ball of wax. My kidsā school had a special session just for students applying to California public schools. Many students were accepted without being top students, including at UCLA and Berkeley. Again, I advise checking with your childās school for their own track record.
Naviance will provide you this information assuming your boarding school uses it. Not perfect by any means but it does give you baseline GPA/ACT/ACT for kids accepted/waitlisted/rejected to UCLA (or any college assuming there have been applicants recently). I found it far more predictable for public colleges than for private ones.
They say it is easier for full pay out-of-State kids to get into to the UCs than for CA kids. The schools need the revenue.
Re homework, SwamiJr says it is pretty intense. He thinks he gets about 1 hour homework per class as a freshman. On Monday he has every class so his estimate is he gets 5-6 hours. I have spoken/texted with him about 5-6 days a week and I think he gets less than that but for purposes of this conversation letās go with his estimate.
From what I can tell, he uses his free periods and says that he gets more sleep than most of his group of friends. Heās had one very late night so far. That said, I also know he was inefficient one week since he didnāt do much work over a weekend until Sunday night.
Other than wanting him to get enough sleep, I havenāt thought about the amount of homework much. It sounds miserable to me but he seems happy and enjoying the challenge so Iāll stay out of it for now.
This may not apply to your kiddo, but Iāll just mention this: our kid is at one of the well known BSs, and we can see some of kidās iPhone usage through iOS Screen Time - Instagram/Reddit/Games usage. There were times it was 2-3 hours a day, and kid told us it it was nothing compared to other classmates. Kid has since reduced it significantly, but I suspect some kids are on their phones for hours a day, and this will definitely cannibalize time for homework, ECs, etc. The constant pinging of IG and text messages can also seriously distract and cause students to lose focusā¦
This is so true. Our daughter is a day student. When she studies, her phone is never out of reach. Every time it pings ā which is often ā she looks at it. This is obviously a huge impediment to the study process. My husband is a big fan of the Pomodoro Technique and working with her to use it. Heās also suggested she share it with all her friends so when they study together, which is often, they can be in synch. I think tools like this can be invaluable to this generation.
Related question - do any of you have access to quiz/test.homework grades during the semester via an online platform from the school? Or, do you just wait until mid-semester and final grades are posted?
@ProudDramaMama I am also a big fan of the Pomodoro Technique.
One of my kids used an app that would lock up the phone or certain applications on it like social media for a fixed period of time in order to avoid temptation and focus.