Getting a lot of work done in a short period time, keeping work organized in say a binder, and being able to form and make use of study groups and other resources, maybe even including tutors or parental help (egad) …
if you are going to a rigorous college, you better figure this stuff out. Or maybe figure out that a 21-40 ranked school is just right for you, or maybe even egad 41-60 or 61-80 or below.
If the top 30 people in your HS always go to Ivies or equivalents, and you are ranked 45 - well, enjoy their company and the academic rigor of your high school and aim lower. Or if you are ranked 80 … aim lower again.
Most of my HS classmates I knew and I are definitely outliers, but we found college courses to have lighter demands, more manageable pacing/rigor, easier demands when writing extended papers, and more “handholding” than we experienced at our public magnet.
Difficulty in admission doesn’t always equate to high academic workload/rigor/difficulty/pacing. Knew several HS classmates who were C/D students in HS who after spending a year or two at an average public/private college ended up transferring up to elite colleges like Cornell, Columbia, Reed, Brown, etc and graduating near the top of their undergrad classes. And most of them were STEM or STEM/non-STEM double majors. Most of them felt undergrad even at the elite college they finished at was much more manageable and easier than HS with the exception of the ones attending Cornell and Reed where they felt it was the same or slightly worse.
I agree with @QuantumMech. We reject classes that focus on quantity of output over quality of output. A simple example (which I think I might have shared earlier in this thread) was an AP cal BC class ds originally signed up for that used the Larson textbook (which is a standard cal textbook) but required watching countless videos and 50+ plug and chug problems every single day. He stayed in the class for 2 weeks and was frustrated by the mind-numbing repetition of everything he was required to do. He dropped that class and ran back to AoPS (and no AP designation) where he got to spend his time thinking through challenging problems.
Plug and chug vs. proofs–all work is not equal. Simply b/c a kid is capable of massive amts of low level output does not automatically elevate the work to worthwhile or indicate future academic success. Lesser amts of output with higher levels of analysis/problem-solving may be the better choice.
I really enjoyed the book and have recommended it to parents of younger children as it might have been a bit too late for my own children. The philosophy expressed gave me a new perspective when it came to letting my 17 year old travel out of state on a camping trip/white water rafting trip with other boys his age. He is very grateful that I have stopped hovering and am willing to put my own fears aside to let him become an adult. He is planning a cross country trip for the summer following senior year and I think I will give him my blessing (along with my car :0) I will embrace the tenets once again when my college daughter studies abroad.
Some aspects of college work have certainly changed since I was a student. But I am a faculty member at a university, so I am able to observe the “production” workloads of a number of classes; and QMP and friends were in college more recently. A lot of courses still have 2 midterms and a final–done. Other courses have midterms, a final, and a paper. Some STEM courses do have problem sets, but the number and time required are variable. (Harvard’s Math 55 is a real outlier.)
No university STEM class that I’ve seen has the “production” workload of the high school calculus class mentioned by Mom2aphysicsgeek. Harvard’s Math 55 would take longer, but it would have fewer, much higher level problems.
I agree that asking the students to keep work in binders is partly about organization; I was just trying to quantify the sheer bulk of paperwork done by the high school student, at 2" (or more) per class per semester.
We have D students in AP classes, including students who are trying. And, it’s because the College Board and other education people say “The College Board has done studies that show that kids who take AP courses do better in the equivalent college class even if they get a 1 or 2 on the AP test.” Really? The College Board funded studies that show that everyone should take more AP tests? (See: studies funded by the oil industry, etc.)
So, the school pushes kids who aren’t ready into AP classes, and the parents complain about the homework and grading. They show “Race to Nowhere” at the school, and talk about how too much homework is ruining childhood. I’ll agree that it’s tough for my son with all the other things he does, but it’s not as tough for him as for kids who actually need to study for tests beyond doing the homework.
5 sections of 11th grade AP Language & Comp, and 2 sections of 12th grade AP Literature. So, 90 or 150 kids decided AP classes were too tough in English? 6 sections of AP World History and 4 of APUSH.
The parents of the kids who get the low grades in AP World History and AP Lang (which are the classes they push kids into), don’t know what their kids are getting themselves into. Then, a D in a class has to be made up over the summer with a non-AP class.
At Back-to-School Night this year, there was a mom in the AP Biology class who was surprised that her daughter was in a “hard” class. How did that happen?
(Public HS with some high-achieving kids but also about 50% low income and English learners.)
@Ynotgo - the interesting thing to me about “Race to Nowhere” is that it didn’t in any way address the fact that some kids are totally fine with the expectations/rigor of hard classes.
The problem seemed overwhelmingly obviously to be that the mother had a different expectation than her kids were able to fulfill. So the solution is to gut everyone else’s education? I would think the solution is to have more realistic expectations of each child’s “running his/her own race”.
I also wondered if it was based on the mother’s own education/dreams. Does anyone know if the kids were biologically related to the mother? They looked nothing like her, I remember. Or maybe they were actors?
When I attended my public magnet, most of the student body were low-income to lower middle class SES-wise and a substantial proportion were recent immigrants for whom English is a second language.
While “Race To Nowhere” has been heavily promoted by a few parents of students and recent alums of my public magnet, they tend to be White and from higher SES backgrounds/neighborhoods like the UES. It’s also a film most parents of students/alums don’t agree with as applied to students at our HS for the following reasons:
Most would reasonably argue that having a heavy workload...including homework was one of the things one signed up for considering the public magnet's reputation for that was well-known. Even teachers/admins in my time would cite this whenever a student or occasionally parent complains about "too much homework" or "my son/daughter doesn't get enough sleep". The commonplace "tough cookies" reply they'd use, "If the workload's too much, you/your child could always transfer back to their zoned neighborhood HS".
A critical mass of the families and parents came from cultures where high academic rigor and workloads...including homework were commonplace. Such families during the period I was in HS...including many native-born American ones feel most average US public K-12 academic rigor and workloads are if anything "too lax/light" and would revolt if any parent or admin proposed reducing the rigor or the workload...including homework. Several such parents were of the mind that if there was less than 3-4 hours of homework each night, that's "not enough" to prepare their kids for the rigors of college/career competition/grad school*. Did I mention such parents also expect their kids to also juggle ECs and part-time/afterschool jobs without complaint?
This included many parents who have themselves attended elite colleges, grad/professional schools, and became highly paid/respected professionals(i.e. doctors, lawyers, engineers, academics, etc). Granted, nearly all of them were immigrants or native-born Americans from low-income/working-class backgrounds who didn't have/feel they have adequate social capital to avoid the feeling they had to be 2x+ better than counterparts with higher levels of SES/social capital just to get half as far.
I continue to say that there is a great difference between the complaints of “too difficult to learn” and “too much to do.” Often, an overload of production-type work can interfere with true, higher-level learning. I think this is why most university classes are not heavily loaded with production-type work, and yet they can be very challenging.
People who have not found this at university level may have selected the wrong classes.
The more I read about @TheGFG’s high school (community?), the more grateful I am to NOT live there. I don’t know where it is but where I am, yes, there is a lot of homework but no, it isn’t an insane amount. Even in the STEM program, where all the classes are honors and AP, my child was able to get to bed by 10:30pm all the way through high school. We did not freak out if D made B’s as long as she was enjoying the class and learning the material. If she were getting D’s in an AP class, I’m pretty sure we would have discussed moving down to the honors level but that never happened.
I think there is some need to manage expectations. Like I said, we were fine with B’s but I knew parents who would get on their children’s case for getting a 90 or worse, 87. As a result, the kids were anxious and often not sleeping well at night (it wasn’t necessarily homework that kept them up at night but saying so was much better than “my parents are harassing me to the point where I can’t sleep”). We were fine with our child not attending a top 20 college/university. What I discovered was that students generally got into the schools appropriate for their level. The overachievers ended up at good, but not top 10 or 20 schools. In other words, they probably could have relaxed a bit in high school (and slept) and still end up in the exact same college.
That’s a good point. However, most such parents and HS admins during the period I attended HS had the same reply to both complaints: If it’s too difficult/much for you/your child, you could always transfer back to your zoned neighborhood HS".
The prevailing attitude was we students were expected to deal with the academic, ECs, and/or part-time jobs and juggle them all without complaint. Any parent who wanted the workload reduced or the difficulty watered down because their child can’t cope with the current levels as is wouldn’t be viewed sympathetically not only by admins, but also by most parents back then.
I also think there is a difference between schools where some of the top students are handling the workload while getting 8 hours of sleep or so a night, while others are having a hard time, vs. schools where essentially none of the top students are handling the workload while getting that much sleep. The brains of teenagers are still developing.
I realize that some people (especially adults) function fine on relatively little sleep, but I don’t think high school should be a sleep-deprivation contest.
But there is still the opportunity for parent intervention. Some treat this wretchedness in a way that suggests they buy into it. “Johnny won’t get into [the prescribed target level of colleges] unless…” Or, they act helpless. Or they act as if Johnny will be perceived as less if he isn’t on the rigor track (like keeping up with the Joneses.) So what is it really?
Agreed. I didn’t enjoy that aspect of my HS experience and yet, I was considered a “slacker” by going to sleep at 1-2 am every night when most classmates, especially the AP/4-year college dual-enrollment students except the genuine geniuses were staying up to 3-4 am.
Part of it was the macho factor where most students and even parents felt the less sleep one needed to cope, the “hardier” and “tougher” the student was whereas ones who needed more sleep like yours truly were “slackers” or in the parlance of adolescent boys in my old neighborhood…“sissies”.
Regardless of whether or not my school is an outlier, the “experts” who write these sorts of articles ask us to accept the premise that too large a subset of today’s parents are misbehaving and over-parenting. Assuming this is true, then why is it happening? It seems to me that parents in the higher socio-economic strata most likely to be affected by the helicoptering malady are high-achieving professionals themselves. Thus, they are very busy and stressed enough by their own jobs and responsibilities. So why would they engage in a behavior which is going add to their workload? And if they’re average joes, then wouldn’t they be the types to be governed by the law of inertia? Why would they veer off of their paths of least resistance in order to exert the tremendous effort needed to micromanage another human’s life for him? Can this phenomenon really be due to oversized parental egos, or rampant delusions regarding their children’s grandeur? It seems like an incredibly exhausting way to live, and therefore I think that if that many people are truly doing it, it’s because they honestly believe they have to. I have written upthread about some reasons I’ve seen parents helicopter, and it’s not because they’re crazy perfectionists who crave Harvard.
Secondly, quantmech is right. It’s different if it’s just a few kids struggling and consistently staying up to all hours than if it’s ALL the top kids. And there’s a distinction between the work being difficult in quality and the work being difficult due to excessive quantity. As I wrote in the homework thread, a parental uprising is underfoot in our town and in the surrounding towns, which confirms what I already knew from years of experience: it’s not just us.
@TheGFG - just asking - how do you know “ALL the top kids” are “struggling and consistently staying up to all hours”? By your description, your D is not among the top kids, so I’m honestly asking where your data is coming from. On this thread, you’ve heard from many parents, teachers, teens, and young adults, saying that in their personal lives, there are top kids who are able to succeed even with high bars in rigorous classes, without such an unreasonable burden.
Since you ask, I do think it’s far more likely for parents to be mistaken (Lake Woebegon Effect) about their kid’s prospects for Harvard, than it is that there is some conspiracy theory about lack of STEM teachers trying to sneak out of actually teaching material because they can’t and anyway there aren’t enough spaces in the course, sshhhhh don’t tell anyone.
On CC, I understand why there is a focus on the thought that “top” college admissions is behind the ridiculous hours that some students are working on classwork and ECs.
However, hardly anyone has responded to my view that students should do their homework, in the immediate time frame, connected only with the classes in which they are currently enrolled, and with no connection to which colleges this makes them eligible for. I believe that students are supposed to do their assigned homework. (I remarked earlier that at the military academies, as I understand it, homework assignments are regarded as orders.)
In my opinion, there should be a reciprocal responsibility of the teachers to assign homework that can be done in a reasonable time frame (assuming that the student understands the material, etc.) I think that many of the teachers locally underestimate how long their assignments will actually take.
There was a case reported in the media and on CC some time ago, where an adult followed a high school student’s schedule and reported feeling worn out at the end of the day. But the adult did none of the homework and none of the extracurriculars, and therefore had no clue what the actual demands were.
Fretfulmother, I already answered your questions on another current thread and, frankly, on countless threads over the years. This is my third child, so I have 11 years of experience with the district’s high school workload which dates back to the days of IMing on the computer when I could see messages from countless kids from S’s classes pop up on the screen as they’d be trying to puzzle out a physics problem that had stumped them all or they’d be commiserating at 3 in the morning that their English paper wasn’t done yet because they just had too much to do for the same day. Yes, my youngest is not at the same level as her siblings, and it’s true that sometimes certain mathy things take her too long to figure out, but the bulk of the problem is actually the quantity. It’s objectively excessive, as per my English class example on this thread. And while my high school may be an outlier nationally, I don’t think it’s such an outlier in our state. When D attended our state’s competitive Governor’s School, she said one night the whole group of them were talking about their respective high schools and they discussed how neither they nor their friends could ever sleep more than 4 hours a night due to homework. Parent talk to each other too, especially if they are worried about their children and are trying to determine the source of the problem–their kid’s ability or the class itself. Finally, what would I gain by lying or exaggerating? I’m not making excuses for my kids or anything. My older two were both admitted to lottery schools, which like cobrat, they found to be easier time-management wise than high school. Clearly, I’d impress this crowd more if I said it was a breeze for my kids and they just accidentally got into top schools merely because they are exceptional.
Sorry, but did you really mean that people who are not professionally successful (assumedly in your terms) are lazy? I too find busy work to be a “hobgoblin of small minds” to coin a phrase, so was with you in spirit for a good part of this thread. Now I am beginning to wonder whether some of the problem is a matter of perspective, because I have to tell you that it is difficult to reconcile the above phrase with the statement that you don’t want your daughter competing with the “top” kids