The sad thing I could not get mad because because I used to do the same thing. In addition I used to write on the back side of the page, starting at the back of the book in my notebooks (I still do this), freaking out teachers having them think that I had blank notebooks 
I never saw my daughter do 2 hours of homework ever. In fact, I rarely saw her do any homework. Yet she always had straight Aâs. Just efficient, I guess. I suspect she did her math homework in English class, etc. My son, on the other hand, could no more have completed 2 hours of homework a night than fly to the moon. He panicked if he had two assignments. If I knew then what I know now we would have done a lot of things differently.
In the bay area, public middle schools donât assign more than 1-2 hours max, typically projects, book reports etc are assigned over a longer period. They assign h/w more for the parents than the students. You donât want to even imagine the parental backlash if there was no homework.
My older daughter did have 2-4 hours per night in middle school. Through a lot of lobbying by a lot of people, the middle school has cut this down a lot. My younger daughter benefited. She had about 30 minutes per night in middle school. She is absolutely doing as well in high school, perhaps a bit better, than my older kid did.
I have read some local comments about people pulling their kids out of public schools because they arenât happy to hear about the return to sanity the public middle school has had. Oh well. Kid #2 had a much happier, though just as educational, experience.
A HS student does not need to have massive amounts of homework in order to create a portfolio of high SATs, 5âs on APs and a high GPA. Actually, too much homework gets in the way of creativity, teamwork, leadership, sports and finding out what they are passionate about. My oldest tells me that students from the most exclusive NYC high schools sometimes struggle at an IVY freshmen year because they have had good teachers providing curriculum and pushing them all along. Suddenly not all professors teach well or give homework assignments that prepare for exams. Private school students may have been exposed to higher level classes, but eventually intellect and perseverance define where individuals land on the grading curves.
Middle school students need a strong foundation in reading, writing and math and a passion for learning. Content is not as important before they have the maturity to delve into subjects. Too much homework can easily backfire and create a very unhappy student.
There were many nights in middle school my kids were at the kitchen table, loaded down with ⊠well, itâs called homework but I called it busywork.
One night, Iâd had enough. I looked at everything they brought home for a week. I wrote it down every day, and timed them. Not to make them rush, but to have information. Trust me, they were not anywhere near TVs or phones. I was right there in the kitchen. It really did take 2-3 hours most nights - and thatâs with no breaks.
I presented that to a teacher who was the worst offender. She had no idea - her idea of 15 minutes of homework was easily an hour for the kids. She started giving the kids class time to work on it, and it got better.
Multiply that by five or six teachers, and it adds up fast.
I write very quickly (do it for a living). If I am assigned a 500 word essay, I can do it in about half an hour (depending on the research involved). My kids? No way. I think thatâs what missing for some classes is a reasonable expectation about how long something might take. Two pages of algebra problems is nothing for the algebra teacher. To someone just learning the concepts, itâs going to take a lot longer.
Once or twice in elementary school I had my kids turn in a note with the homework that said, in light of the schoolâs homework policy of 10 mins x grade level, I was having my kid stop doing the homework as they had gone way, way over the guidelines.
As to the OPâs question. Most studies that I have seen have shown little value in large amounts of homework. (And no I am not going to hunt them down!) My kids were certainly not as overworked as many who are posted about here - and they still were able to succeed in college. My oldest found time to read over 100 books a year for pleasure and my younger son wasnât far behind.
@MotherOf3Dragons
I wish you would clarify.
Is this that it TAKES your kid that long to do homeworkâŠOR is this that there is THAT much homework assigned.
There is a difference.
Schools are different. Types of homework assignments are different. I find it totally credible that it might take a middle school student 2 to 4 hours to complete assigned homework each night, when the student is working exclusively on homework and not interrupting it with social media or other things.
In my era (the late Cretaceous), better students could usually finish the homework faster, especially in math, but also with reading-related assignments, work in foreign languages, etc. Later, âauthenticâ assignments came into fashion. These tend to require at least as much time from the better students as from the weaker students, if not more, because they are open-ended and offer a great deal of opportunity to dig deeper or produce a better âproduct.â Sometimes they come with extensive requirements for art work or other forms of âcreativity.â
A middle school example of this that I have already mentioned on CC: 8th grade, build a working Rube Goldberg device. It may have been supposed to include all of the simple machines. Students were advised (in writing) to work on it at times when their parents could help. A web search for inspiration turned up a device built in only 1440 hours by a group of Purdue engineering students. The rubric for this project, passed out in advance, showed that a project I would have considered to be quite commendable would yield 3 points out of 4 in each of the categories, which was a grade of C. One bonus: QMP gained experience with a power drill at age 13, while I had never used one until I was 43. My main consolation about this project was that sooner or later, the teachersâ children would also have to do it! No such luck! It was converted to being an optional project, just as the teachersâ children were starting to reach 8th grade. I donât know whether there was any carry-over to reducing the time requirements for other types of assignments.
I think that teachers tend to underestimate how long the work will actually takeâor else students can rush through the work and turn in something marginally acceptable. Perhaps the rubric was phony.
From these posts it looks like standards vary a lot! Some lucky students and parents can rely on a homework policy and others cannot. I personally think kids should be learning at their own pace. For us, that means supplementing regular school work with work that has depth and is fairly difficult vs. the common core. I cannot imagine pushing work at the expense of life. Sport, socialization and reading are all important. I think about it like this. What could I conceivably do after a full school day? Then we plan it into the week. Mostly the kids do extra work on the weekends. During the week, they are busy with activities and just going to school. I do think a lot of mental health issues are arising from society pushing and pushing kids, sending them messages which tie academic success to self worth and even more insidious factors ( like parents telling their kids do this or else). As a previous poster said, Know you kid(s). And know what you are hoping to achieve. I personally think kids have a specific mindset and parents need to match the kid with what they need at the specific time. Thatâs why parenting is so hard.
It should be obvious that I think that 2 to 4 hours of homework per night for a middle schooler is completely unnecessary. It is also very unwise.
BTW our elementary schoolâs homework policy was a PTA initiated project. We worked with the teachers to find out what the norms were, talk about what homework was for and then come up with guidelines. It was at about the same time you began to see rubrics which also helped kids (and parents) understand what was expected for the some of the bigger more complicated assignments. Just because your school has no homework policy, it doesnât mean it canât get one.
This is the Atlantic article the OP is referring to https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/my-daughters-homework-is-killing-me/309514/.
Most of the homework seems to be math, reading, and studying for tests. I didnât go to a fancy school like the authorâs daughter, but to be frank, I would often lower my homework load by just not doing it. If you understand the concepts, you donât need to do the same math problem 10 different times with the numbers changed. And IMO an hour of sleep can often do more good than an hour of extra studying. And so on.
Iâm a NYC school parent and both my DCs attended competitive MS. Itâs my impression that the homework hours is a bit of an arms race among the schools. Theyâre using that estimate to convey to applicants that they value academic rigor and expect the kids to work hard in and out of school. But the actual hours put into hw really varies. There were some days when it went 4 hours, but not a lot. 1 or 2 a day was common, with the occasional late night on a test or big project.
Massachusetts is ranked 1st in the nation for education(Forbes, US News, etc.).
I have a son finishing up middle school. Heâs a straight A student in the advanced track within the school(even though theyâre not allowed to classify it as such).
He rarely has more than 60 minutes of homework per night. His teachers are not allowed to issue homework over the weekend.
Weâve been told by local administrators that time spent on homework beyond 120 minutes per night is actually counterproductive.
Is @MotherOf3Dragons ever going to clarify her question?
Do her kids TAKE that long to do their homework every nightâŠ
OR
Is this the assigned homework given every night?
There is a difference.
Some kids get straight to the homework and finish it ASAP. Others dilly dally their way through the homework and therefore it takes longer!
I think her question was very clear. In some areas of the country (not surprisingly, LA and NY), there is something of an arms race of homework. She is asking if it is NECESSARY. Seems like we all agree the answer is NO, though for those of us in LA and NY, there are few alternatives. Our former high-achieving public school had more homework than the private schools we moved the kids to, but the kids still do a ton of homework. Private alternative schools (Waldorf, etc) are there for a select few, but are not a large-scale solution, and arenât a good personality fit for many families anyway. One friend of mine noted the other day that private schools that are K-8 have the most homework in middle school b/c they are trying desperately to place their students in selective private high schools, so the arms race is intense there. Probably your best bet in LA for a more reasonable middle school experience are those few 7-12 grade privates out there.
@Time2Shine Please find me a job in Massachusetts!
I always find this stuff interesting, middle school in my state goes until end of 8th, it used to go until end of 9th until pretty recently. I went to high (senior) school (another continent LOL) at 11/12. Middle schoolers around here are still babied. they are up to 13/14? School days are short. so much time is wasted. HWK is vital. As above, when a kid doesn't have the phone, the telly, the puter attached to distractions, see how long it really takes. But 12/13/14 yr olds need to be able to work that out themselves.
6th grade was about 45mn but could be done in less by quick reader and someone who worked fast in class and could start on the work early. 7th&8th grade was more like 1hour a night. HW allowed on weekends but nothing extraordinary. Nobody suffered academically, especially since it left plenty of time for reading, music, sports, TV together, etc.