<p>An hour per subject… we have five to seven classes a day. Five to seven hours? After an eight hour school day (with only a 23 minute lunch)? That’s ridiculous.</p>
<p>I guess it all depends on the kids and their families. One of the best students in our HS last year studied past 1 am on a daily basis while being the captain of swim team and NOSB team. His stats got him into Princeton and MIT. The atrocious thing about this is – this kid is not alone at the HS. Most of the elite students there don’t sleep much on weeknights. And yes, this pattern starts around 10/11th grade. We know only one good student who sleeps at 10, but he gets up really early and put in two hours of study before school!</p>
<p>Do we really want our kids to live this kind of high school life?? It is wrong. They need their sleep.</p>
<p>I strongly believe in EC’s. It is not healthy to do homework for whole evening. Sometime I was screaming at my D. to pack them away and just stop and assume that she is done what she could. She has always completed HW, her thing though was to rewrite her papers forever and ever until she did not even know why she is rewriting it. She still is a very good writer, who writes very fast and with ease with essays rarely taking over 40 min, of course 4 page single spaced will take longer to just type, but that is what she is up to when asked to put few paragraphs to reflect on some experiences.</p>
<p>Oldfort how do your kids do it? I don’t mean to pick on you, you’ve just been kind enough to share a good example of a very typical schedule for so many teens. </p>
<p>If it’s 3-5 hours of homework, and say 3-4 hours of ballet, after 6-7 hours of school… 16 hours right there…leaving only 8 for sleep, not to mention eating dinner, making lunch, showers, commute, reading before bed, time to doze off (or whatever…you know, just the real life bits and pieces).</p>
<p>Starbright,
As I mentioned before, D. swam competitvely all thru HS. Since her HS did not have swim team/coach, she practiced with club. The USS club practices are much longer and much more rigorous and all thing with travel was at least 3.5 hours every day, including Saturday with a lot of out of town competitions and midlle of week Wednesday HS competitions (D. actually was able to register herself as one person HS team and represented her school as well as her club). However, this was just one EC. Another was piano with daily practices (resulted in Music Minor at college) and weekly private art lessons, where I talked to her teacher to make sure that there are no assignment to be done at home. Of course, she was also Newspaper Editor with winning article under her belt. Kids can do whatever, if they want to, if they are doing what they have chosen to do, not what their parents want them to do. Their EC actually help them and make them more successful at college since they have learned to manage their time. I strongly believe that EC’s helped my D to be happier, more social dealing with various groups of kids and still straight “A” student (colleg junior).</p>
<p>starbright - my kids would usually take advantage of their study and conference periods at school. Instead of socializing, they’ll go to school’s library to study (1-2 hours/day). They are exempt from gym because of ballet. Depending on the day (normally on their ballet days), they’ll get home by 2:30. They’ll work for a few hours before ballet(2 hours). They’ll get home by 9:30 on those nights, and off to bed by 10 or 10:30. One day a week when they don’t have ballet, they’ll have an hour of piano lesson. We have the teacher come to our house to cut down on their travel time. My younger daughter wakes up earlier to practice piano every day (older one was not so good with that). On Sun they do extra work, papers or prepare for exams. Their classes usually give out syllabus a month before to allow students to plan ahead. On days when their clubs meet, they’ll lose out on those study periods.</p>
<p>When it becomes too much, like if I see their grades dropping, I’ll yank them out of ballet for a week. Both of them love to dance, especially the younger one. They have great incentive to keep their grades up. </p>
<p>This is not all without cost to us. My husband and I have made ourselve available to them to get them to places. We opted to pick them up early from school instead of waiting until 3:30 to get rides with other kids, so they could have extra time to do homework. </p>
<p>One thing I would like to say is my kids are not and were not stressed out in high school. Other than ballet, they could decide to drop an EC (like violin for my younger daughter) when it’s too much. We never forced them to do anything except to go to bed on time and get good grades. They willingly sacrificed a lot of personal time because of their love for ballet, not for college application. D1’s only hook was her GPA.</p>
<p>Best to take your cue from your kids. One of the most difficult lessons that kids learn is how to balance. There is a point where kids have too many ECs and too little sleep on top of their “homework” style. We do them no good if we don’t put a halt to some less important activity if we see them burning out or under stress. The best thing the OP can do is ensure that her child is not overscheduled in other activites and can devote the amount of time needed as an LD student to what is needed to be successful at school. “Dropping” an activity is not always a negative thing. It is far better in the long run to do well in school and have a passionate pursuit of one or two things.</p>
<p>^Yes, the only thing I forced my D. to do is to go to bed on time, right after swim practice, no homework was allowed any more. I have never pushed her with grades, but begged her many times to pack her books stop re-writing her papers.</p>
<p>I also have to enforce bedtimes. 10 pm is usually D’s limit. Occasionally, if something comes up, I will allow midnight (I had to one day this week already) but I know several of her friends who are up 'till 2 am or so every day studying and doing homework. I just do not get it.</p>
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<p>oldfort - Your family has very good discipline on time management. Even with this schedule, it still amazes me that your Ds were able to get excellent grades and avoid burning midnight oil throughout HS. They must be extremely smart and efficient in what they did. Kudos!</p>
<p>My D was in a similar position to Oldfort’s. For 11th & 12th grade, she was doing 18-20 hours of ballet per week plus had top-level orchestra rehearsals. With ballet and dinner, homework didn’t even <em>start</em> until 8pm at the earliest.</p>
<p>There was no choice. D was routinely up until 11:30pm or midnight or even a little later, doing problem sets and then up out of bed in the morning in time to make her Period 0 class at 7:20am.</p>
<p>Because of this schedule, she was exempt from household chores. She caught up on sleep when she could on the weekends, working around rehearsals and performances. One of the rare disagreements with TheMom about D was bedtime; TheMom wanted D to knock off the homework by 11pm. There was no way her grades would not have suffered. </p>
<p>I found out later that D was cranking out calculus problems longhand instead of feeding everything through her graphing calculator because she wanted to make <em>sure</em> she understood everything completely…if I had known, I wouldn’t have been quite as surprised by the ultimate choice of a double major that included Math.</p>
<p>The last two years of high school were grueling. But the upside was that her time management skills were honed that when she got to college and there were only 4-5 hours per week of ballet it was like running with lead weights removed, even taking 20 units a semester, and was in general like a piece of cake…until senior year, when it became grueling again when she kicked it into even higher gear with a major award on the line.</p>
<p>It was difficult…but it paid off for her, all along the line.</p>
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<p>This is exactly what I’m hoping for. TD - thanks for sharing this.</p>
<p>Everyone says they want better schools, etc., and the more demanding schools give lots of homework. Kids who go to college prep schools and pay a lot of money expect a lot fo homework. Yet many parents in other schools complain when their kids have a lot. It doesn’t go both ways. Education is hard work. Some kids take longer to do the work, others take less time. DD, who was in Honors and AP classes had at least 3-4 hours a night. This was on top of EC’s. And she received a really good education in a public that demanded more from their kids.</p>
<p>I would complain about “busy” type of work that kids still waste a lot of time on. K-8 grades are lmostly wasted because of that. HS would not be so cramped if some of the real staff is taught in K-8. Some other countries have 10 years instead of 13 for schooling with no requirement/testing before entering 1st grade at 7, not 5. Their program designed to have much more advanced material in 8-10 grades than HS’s in USA. Their kids DO NOT SPEND more time on homework or more classroom times. There is just less of mindless useless busy filling sheets of paper activity that has zero effect on brain development.</p>
<p>MiamiDAP, I am in complete agreement. My D10 just entered a public school after 5 years of Montessori. This whole week most of her assignments involved drawing something and filling out work sheets-complete fluff but in the first week she already had 5 quizzes. This is 6th grade, BTW.</p>
<p>I just don’t get it. Sorry, back on topic…</p>
<p>How much homework do you think 6 APs will have, on average.</p>
<p>I’m in the 10th grade and I’m currently taking:
AP Chem. [No HW collected. Grade based entirely on tests and labs. However, I do spend three hours studying the day before tests. And sometimes I’ll do the HW]
AP Euro [1.5 hours two nights a week. Random fluff here and there.]
World Lit. H [1 hour for basic assignments. 2-3 for essays]
Spanish III H [.5 -1 hour. Projects take 2 hours though]
Alg II H [ 1.5 - 2 hours. ]</p>
<p>I get home at 8 everyday from volleyball and I usually end up sleeping at 1. Then I get up at seven or six to do HW/study to 8:30. Then I go to school at 9. </p>
<p>Subtract procrastination and Facebook from the equation and you get around 4 hours of HW every night.</p>
<p>But then again. I’m an idiot and I actually take HW seriously : [</p>
<p>LOL. I didn’t know you frequented this forum, fairy_dreams.</p>
<p>2012 is amazing, anyways…</p>
<p>Get on ccislulz, fairy_dreams, you missed out on this massive 13-15 user chat.
Procrastinate some more.</p>
<p>I have to go do some math/USABO lol.</p>
<p>My son is in 10th grade (he started school two weeks ago). He is taking the toughest schedule allowed by our hs (actually tougher). He has Gifted/honors English, Gifted/honors Chemistry, Honors Anatomy and Physiology, Honors Precalculus, Spanish 4 (honors weighted but not called honors by our district), AP World History, and AP Statistics. He has about 6 hours a night of actual homework and has been up most schoolnights until 2 AM. He gets up at 6:45 AM for school. It is definitely not enough sleep for a 15 1/2 year old but at this point (only two weeks in), he seems ok with it. I have “backed off completely” this year from micromanaging him by his and his father’s request. I did ask him about the homework bothering him and he told me that the work was very easy but very time consuming. Every week his AP World teacher routinely assigns homework assignments that take 2-3 hours for the quickest of students to complete…and my son is not the quickest by any means. I have addressed my concerns for this child on other threads but honestly, I agree with the child psychologist who I consulted with last week. If you have a child who welcomes the challenge and wants to do this then you need to let them. It was their choice (at least it was my son’s choice) to load his schedule this way. He didn’t need to take 2 AP’s as a sophomore or any for that matter. He could have opted out of Gifted/honors classes in lieu of plain honors classes and had half the homework and assignments (although he wouldn’t have the same caliper of student in his classes). The colleges he applies to someday will never know that he did almost double the work in his gifted/honors because his transcript only will say honors…but he wanted this and this student population. On the up side, he will learn to sink or swim. He will learn some form of time management. He will learn his own limits…all while still living under our protective roof.
Once I got it out of my head that the goal was not to get him into the best college but to ultimately get him into the best college FOR HIM, it was easier to let him choose his own path. We are both still a work in progress. He is working on time management, being the best student he can be and still managing to have a life. I am working on becoming more “Zen” with the “Love the kid on the couch” concept. I have a lot of work to do since my brain in sending me very mixed messages (about the need to get such a bright kid into a top 25 college versus the need to have a happy, maturing son who will thrive whereever and whatever he does…even if he dosen’t reach his potential because he spent too much time or burnt out on “over reaching”). We will talk next June. I’ll let you know how that went.</p>
<p>Seician, I am amazed at your son, and even more amazed that the psychologist endorsed his exhausting schedule. I have heard that some gifted individuals need less sleep than normal. Maybe your son is one of them.
For my daughter with ADD, sleep deprivation is not an option, as she gets silly when she is tired. I pretty much insist she go to bed by 10PM on school nights. I guess if the homework is not done by then, it will not get done.</p>