As I read TheGFG’s posts, calculus is not required to graduate in their school district. However, four years of mathematics taken in high school are required to graduate, in that school district. So a choice of math level made in 7th grade or so probably means that the student must take calculus to graduate (given the range of math course offerings).
As I have posted before, I believe that a student is supposed to do the homework. This belief has nothing to do with college admissions. It has to do with the high school environment. Unless one abandons the idea that students should do the homework, I think this imposes an obligation on the teachers to make the load manageable. The other possibility is to adopt the view that the student need not do all of the homework, or is entitled to cut corners on it. One could certainly do this, but I think that has its own problems.
As far as teachers mis-estimating the time that a project will require: I do that with my own work that I have to do all the time, despite lots of experience. Hope springs eternal. A related question is: How long do you think it will take 2 students to produce a 20-minute video on a topic in US history, with background research, continuous video, and a sound track? (Not a video of the students doing a presentation, a video like you might see on PBS, if they ran unfunded amateur hour.)
That’s the same rule regarding math and other subjects like foreign language. One’s required to take x years of a given subject regardless of the level the student entered with. At my HS, that does mean some kids will need to take math or foreign language courses at the graduate level at a nearby 4-year university to fulfill such requirements.
It wasn’t unheard of for classmates to start 9th grade ready to take pre-calc or even calc AB/BC. If anything, the students who stood out like sore thumbs were ones who weren’t advanced and taking math/other courses one would expect at grade level.
One illustration of this was how there were at least 3 sections for 10th and 11th grade math, precalc, AP calc AB/BC, etc populated with a mix of class years including 9th graders as young as 12 whereas there was only one section for students who needed to take 9th grade level math in 9th grade and it was a tiny class in comparison.
That was also what my CS professor said when I asked a similar question when I took the Intro course at a local university as a high school senior. Welcome to college.
I’ve seen this situation before. It isn’t a societal problem. It’s a problem where a smart child has been pushed too far too fast. Maybe it’s a local school district problem where they want to have more kids advancing faster through math. Unfortunately, it sounds like TheGFG’s daughter got caught up in that situation. She simply didn’t have a strong enough base - that’s what happens when kids are pushed too fast through the math sequence and don’t gain a good understanding. Getting an A doesn’t necessarily reflect the child’s true understanding of the material, especially if your teachers are questionable.
I “held” my child back on purpose because I didn’t want her to go too fast. I had seen the outcome (it was the same as TheGFG’s child). The cracks don’t show for Geometry or Algebra II because the student is bright. The cracks begin to show in pre-calc and then the child really struggles in calculus where there is a shift in thinking. I got grief (as did my daughter) for being “behind” in math because she didn’t do 7th grade Algebra I. The result? She took Calc AB/BC as a senior and passed her AP exams while several students who took Algebra I prematurely as 7th graders and took Calc AB/BC as juniors failed their AP exams. Those kids had to retake the AP exam their senior year or just not get AP credit.
It is tough to go against the prevailing attitude of the school, other parents, maybe even the community. I know. But given the choice of doing what’s best for my child and doing what everyone else is doing - I follow my child.
I will grant your first point, I do it as well. However, I don’t usually misjudge my time requirements by a factor of two or three, like what we are talking about here. I would understand if the teacher said “homework should take no more than 30 minutes a day” and it actually took 40-45. I find it harder to understand that it regularly takes an hour or more.
As to your second point, I think it depends on what you mean by a “video you might see on PBS”. If you are talking a stationary camera, on screen cgi, and 20 minutes on Longstreet’s decision not to attack on the second day of the Second Battle of Bull Run? A pretty long time. If you are talking about two kids taking a video on an ipad and splicing in pictures while discussing the evolution of offensive tactics used in the Civil War? Probably quite a bit less, especially if the class happens to be studying the civil war at the time, which presumably would be the point of the project.
I observed the same thing in the computer programming class I took in HS and the 3 intro to CS courses for majors I took in undergrad.
And it’s not only within the CS courses/department.
There’s a strong streak in some corners of the computer technology world where asking questions on how to do something is regarded as a sign the individual is “lazy” and “unwilling to try figuring out the problem him/herself first” through research and experimentation first*.
This was taken to ridiculous extremes* in the early linux forums back in the mid-late '90s where newbies asking what were regarded as “elementary questions” would be routinely flamed and if they persisted in asking the same/similar “newbie type” questions, get themselves banned and targeted for online ridicule/bullying for “being lazy/stupid”. Thankfully that’s mostly a thing of the past as many linux forums…especially those devoted to more user-friendly distributions like Ubuntu or Linux MInt are quite welcoming and happy to help newbies with any questions, even ones which would have been regarded as “lazy/stupid” around 2 decades ago.
A friend at a Boston area college with respectable engineering/CS departments had a prof in his very first intro to CS for majors course. End result: more than 50% of the class scored in the single digits out of 100 on the CS midterm, my friend's 40/100 score was curved to a B/B+, and the Prof had the chuzpah to angrily scold the entire class for around 10-15 minutes for "not getting it".
What magical high school can kids attend and get into tippy top (top 10, or even HPYS) schools without working hard in high school and piling on lots of ECs? Most high schools have one or two people reach this magical tippy top … if yours has 10s of them, then those kids will all be working hard or be … well, more qualified by academic skills, academic talent, organizational skills or an ability to thrive, not just survive, on 5 hours of sleep.
Very few kids should be taking 5 or more AP classes per year, since that would almost be a college workload for a 16 or 17 year old (including possibly not having fully developed college level organizational, reading and writing skills or not having enough drilled in math competence or maybe maturity).
If I had really seen the CFG type issues for my kids and felt that the homework and other competition related issues were holding my kids (including weighing the obvious advantage of good teachers, lots of AP offerings, likely a good arts/music department, and the stimulation and even prodding of being exposed to really top notch peers), I would not have waited 11 years to move to a more reasonable school district … defined by what my kids specifically need.
Most highly accomplished kids won’t get into Harvard or even a top 20 school no matter where they go to high school or whether they go to bed at 11pm or 2am.
If you make your child go to sleep at 11pm, it is very likely they will still perform at the same level as if they stay up until 2am (other than occasional paper is taking time) … exhaustion is terrible for productivity and for performance on tests and other in-class activities.
Regarding college workloads, so is the goal to get into Columbia or Brown so you can have low college workloads and prestige ? There are lots of schools of all different workloads and prestiges, it is only the tippy top that requires herculean efforts for ordinary mortals (there are kids who can pound out a 20 minute video in an hour, I am sure, and be really creative).
How should a teacher estimate the time it takes to do an assignment? Based on my kid that breezed through calculus problem sets or the GFG’s daughter who struggled? Same with a video or other project. Some kids will slap four photos on a poster board, add some writing and be done. Others will scour the internet for just the right shot, spend time figuring out just the correct font, and fret about the title and take 3 times as long. Of course it should be the average, but that doesn’t mean some kids won’t take much longer. Reading speed is also a big variable. Being able to read quickly helped my kids avoid exceptionally long nights of homework.
The GFG’s post about the english class sounded excessive, especially if there were no class time. But in some of the double-period classes my kids had there was always some class time used for reading or individual work.
As to the AP comp sci question from the GFG, the way the post presents it seems like a question the teacher would not answer directly. If you said she explained what she tried, but could not figure out her error, maybe the teacher would have assisted. I find it highly unlikely that in a district like yours a computer science teacher doesn’t know basic Java and was incapable of answering the question.
I would suggest a tutor for your daughter if she is struggling so much in Calculus. She may just need some help filling in some “holes” in her understanding. I am assuming this is AB calc, which certainly should be doable for a good student. It is so hard to see a kid getting so bogged down in one class.
Very few of the kids I have seen matriculate to tippy top schools, including my own, piled on lots of ECs or worked like crazy. All of them worked hard at their academics, and took challenging courses. All also were involved in a variety of things, but usually were really involved in one activity at which they excelled and then more tangentially involved in others. As far as sleep patterns, I have had several crash at my house a time or two over the last several years. Are there nights where they were up grinding out chemistry labs until 2:00am? Yep. But there were nights when they were playing dungeons and dragons after dinner too. I think the kids who can successfully balance a demanding curriculum with some down time are the ones that do the best.
As far as extra curriculars, I happen to teach mock trial at my son’s former high school. Last year the five seniors on that team ended up at Princeton, MIT, Brown, Northwestern and USC. The kid that went to USC won a competitive full tuition scholarship (Stumps? Stamp? something like that). Of those five, one of the kids was the “piling on the ECs/five hours of sleep a night” type who probably did mock trial because it was viewed as a positive to his college application. The other four did it because they thought it would be fun, and truth be told probably because they wanted to prove they were smarter than me and to make my life miserable. The point being that the extra curricular was viewed as exactly that. Something “extra” that they did for reasons of their own. Instead of being part of the “grind” it was part of their relaxation time. A chance to learn something new and hang out with friends. Because they were all naturally intellectually curious (and competitive), they “worked” hard at it, and they did well. But I would be amazed if any of them ever lost sleep prepping for mock trial.
Just a short digression because we are talking about videos, but the IB film class at my son’s school did a different “This is SportsCenter” spoof commercial (using football players/teachers) for each week of the football season last year that was freakin’ hilarious. One of them was even played on ESPN.
Those kids could probably do a killer twenty minute video in a half an hour. By the same token my daughter the artsy kid could probably do something on video that looked tasteful and well thought out in an hour or two. My son the knucklehead would probably break the camera. Different kids, different strengths.
D could do the calc work itself (and no, it’s not AP level and yes, she must take it since she needs 3 years of math in high school to graduate), but it was the physics and mistakes in the problem that caused the issue. So it was only partially her “fault.” I wish I could say this is unusual, but there was a similar issue with a worksheet on error bars in which the bio teacher was also wrong. Folks, we do have some PhD’s and really bright people teaching STEM classes at our high school, but they are the exception not the norm. Regrettably, D doesn’t have any of them this year. She did have a PhD for freshman physics and he knew his stuff, so she learned it and did quite well despite her lesser ability in math. Regardless, it’s not about my D-- I used examples from my life to try to show how and why a parent may gradually get more and more involved in a child’s life without really wanting to. I can guarantee you my mom never needed to consult a PhD about my math homework. On another night, out of desperation, D contacted her brother for math help. He’s an Ivy grad who majored in econ, took Calc BC in high school and more math in college, and works with math in his job. It took him 4 hours to work her homework problems. I suppose he might be stupid too, though. I wish I knew the magic secret, since obviously everyone knows it but our loser family.
Secondly, I do think teachers regularly underestimate the time needed to do their assignments. One reason is they don’t factor in all the little extras, like going onto their website to print out the assignment, buying supplies, finding an appropriate, not copyright protected graphic to decorate the presentation, driving to and from the educational event they are supposed to attend and the like. But more than that, I suspect some don’t possess the level of intellectual rigor some of the top students do, such that they misjudge the amount of research needed to accurately answer the prompt for the paper. As an example, English and history rubrics now break one of the cardinal rules we were taught, which is to never introduce new topics or facts in the conclusion. What is now required is synthesis in the closing paragraph. The student is supposed to “extend the argument by explaining the connections between the argument and a development in a different historical period, situation, era, or geographic area,” or “a different discipline or field of inquiry.” Ok, so D had a history research paper due Tuesday, assigned Friday. She did fine with the topic, but then came the synthesis part. How do you know if you can accurately compare the situation in your paper to another situation in a different time period or location or discipline unless you spend time researching that other thing? And that’s if you have some inkling of background knowledge of where to start looking. If not, you could pass many unfruitful hours looking for a needle in a haystack. I think to do this well, it takes more time than the teacher likely thinks it does. Unless he just wants a speculative comparison or guess in “research” paper? I kind of think that maybe Puritanism impacted capitalism in America in the same way Calvinism might have impacted the German economy in the 20th century?
GFG, I was always a bad math student and as a result, always had the bad math teachers. I was very happy and grateful by the time my own kids started school that the practice of giving the remedial students the worst teachers was no longer in play.
So for sure I sympathize- a good teacher is often the difference between “getting” something on the first explanation, vs. grinding away for weeks trying to understand a new concept.
Are the other parents in her class as diligent about their kid keeping up as you are? If they are- you’ve got a lot of allies to fix the situation.
Locally, none of the teachers ever gave a time estimate for the homework, except for the AP Calc BC teacher, who said that it would take 2 hours per night. (This was an over-estimate.) QMP reads faster than I do.
I am just guessing how long they must have thought the homework would take, since I presume they thought that the demands were reasonable.
And Hunt’s comment about the video project made me laugh–although in this particular case, the work was shared pretty equally, and there was primary source work involved, which made it take longer than 20 hours overall.
One of the few times we ever intervened was a situation like what TheGFG is describing. Our daughter was required to satisfy a “tech ed” requirement, and the class recommended for good students was (something like) “Fundamentals of Engineering.” The teacher was not an engineer, nor (in my opinion) was she competent to teach the class. One of the first homework assignments included math concepts that had not been taught, and which we (I mean, my wife, who is the STEM person) could not figure out. We complained and got her switched out of the class, and we later learned that there was a general exodus of many students from the class. We were fortunate that this was exceptional, and that we were able to get her out of there.
And wow, if people believe that two students can produce a 20 minute PBS style video in half an hour to an hour, well, no wonder those kids can get adequate sleep. This wasn’t supposed to be a “kids’ talking heads” video. And what’s up with all of those names and production times on actual PBS videos?
20 hours seems much more realistic than one or two hours to produce a 20-minute video and even that seems kind of fast. If people are thinking it should only take a couple of hours, they are seriously deluded in the amount of time projects (should) take. Put it this way, filming a 3-minute video in four hours (never mind time for background research, script writing and editing) is fast.
Maybe you just shoot an iPad video, get a B on that assignment and move onto other items on your list so you can get to bed at 11pm. Not every homework assignment needs to be 100% to get a reasonable grade in the class (HW typically is less than 10%). It’s trying out the problems and then listening in to the answers in class the next day or looking over the solution set that is really important.
Similarly, if you are taking 18 credits including some STEM freshman weedout classes you need to prioritize the work that counts a lot or teaches you a lot or is very doable over getting a 100% on HW or doing repetivite problems 1-15 in the chapter if you can solve #57 without any difficulty or trying to solve probem #57 for 3 hours when you are making no progress.
Agree with other poster, ECs are supposed to be fun and relaxing down time. For many high achievers, hanging out with fellow high achievers arguing in fake courtroom settings is actually fun. If your child is not having fun in their ECs and unwinding from their high pressure academics, if that is the case, there are plenty of options … anywhere …
Considering most public universities expect SAT scores of very modest values like 580, 600, even a few 480s, how on earth can a high school be so competitive that the graduates can’t attend a decent college, if we just assume they can’t get into HYPS ?
Personally, I almost believe no one gets into HYP … although we had two get into S, top 300 HS, exceptionally hardworking, hard achieving classes. So this is a race to nowhere, right ? Why not have a good HS experience with say 6 AP classes total, some enjoyable and somewhat modest ECs, and go to your local state flagship or similar 51-100 university.
Another question, how on earth would helicoptering beyond normal involvement in PTA and some EC shuttling really help your child ? Seems more a factor of parents wanting to helicopter than that it would really have any beneficial effect. That pasta party hosting gig just doesn’t get you into HYPS.
PickOne1, the video was a major project, not normal homework. This was back in the days when we (at least) did not have any iPads. If you saw the rubric, you would be fairly convinced that nothing dashed out in an hour would pass.
Yes, if you are doing a primary source piece on the effect of flooding on crop production in the amazon basin, I am sure it takes hundreds of hours to put together twenty usable minutes of professional quality video. Is that what the assignment was? Where did they get the a/v equipment to do that? How did they do the “primary source work” on something from American History? Did the project entail a trip to Gettysburg? Or did someone read Mary Chestnut’s diary? At some point, isn’t there a rule of rationality that applies to projects like this?
And yes, thirty minutes was intended to be tongue in cheek. I do know however that that particular group of kids was doing well put together 3-4 minute videos each week in well under four hours.
