I have two boys and they have their father’s lack of talent in art. After a bunch of tears in 4th grade (not mine), we made a rule: mom and dad do all coloring. Maps? You label it and I’ll color in the lines. Big poster thing? You lay it all out…type up all the words…and we will cut it out and glue it all on. They did the learning piece…we did the busy work. The best was when i did a rush job on one of the maps in 6th grade…my youngest came home and said "dad you got a B- in history for going outside of the line. You really need to step it up. This is middle school…it’s not elementary school anymore dad.
That’s too much home work and not necessary IMHO. My kids went to a regular public MS. They took advanced classes and played all the sports and tried all the clubs/arts. Maybe an hour of true homework a night.
I will say that at the beginning of MS they were not very organized. As sixth graders they were slower to finish homework (and slower to sit down and start it.) As time went on, the kids became more efficient and learned how to seize free moments during the day to finish their work.
I agree about letting kids have some free time, especially at this age when they are still half child. Looking back on the MS years, I think the biggest changes in my kids weren’t the academic ones, but the social and emotional ones. They got more out of playing basketball than Algebra.
While this may be often true, in our HS, lots of kids wanted to take the honors pre-calc or AP classes and were often shut out due to sheer volume. When there are 35-45 kids who want to take a given honors class freshman year, but the school only has one teacher and one section for it, and they can handle 30 kids max per school board policy, they have decided to limit it to only those students who have earned an A in the pre-req middle school class. One of my pups even went through a lottery to be accepted into a freshman AP class, because there were so many kids who did well in MS. She was # 31, and the class had max 30 kids, however that summer one family moved away so she got in to the very crowded class. Lots of families wanted their kids to be engineers and pushed for them to learn higher level math early
Of course, this limiting also happens in the middle school, as some kids who wanted to take Geometry in 8th grade were denied due to class size restrictions.
Most of the time, the schools really want to accommodate the concerned families, but there are budget constraints, teacher limitations, etc. and sometimes kids will get shut out. The year after my D’s class had problems, they opened another honors level section to address the volume so nobody was shut out. (I suspect my complaint to the school board made them realize they should probably treat academics a bit higher than middle school football).
Having lived through this process, it is still a sore subject to me.
We had the issue of too many kids wanting in freshman AP classes, too. Some years when there were budget cuts it was worse than others. In our experience it usually worked out if the student was patient. People moved, kids who got in over their heads dropped, etc.
I think we have 4 sections of HUG the moat popular AP class accessible to freshman. I’ve never heard of there not being room.
Our high school (in NY) puts any high school classes (Algebra 1 and Biology) from middle school on the high school transcript along with the Regents Exam scores. They are factored into your overall GPA as well. They make it very, very clear to the kids and the parents that they should not sign up for those courses if they aren’t prepared to do the work.
They also cover approximately one year of high school foreign language in middle school, but because it’s spread out over two years, and there’s no corresponding Regents Exam at that level it just appears on the transcript as a credit and is not factored into the GPA.
In theory our high school doesn’t have honors for 9th grade courses, but if you look around 9th grade classrooms, it’s pretty clear that there is some secret tracking going on.
Every school system handles this differently so if you don’t know how your middle school and high school handle these issues - ask!
Is it necessary? No. Is it common? It looks like more than it should.
My dd didn’t have a lot in 6th grade, but the amount has definitely increased in 8th grade. There is a teacher, who she has for social studies and language arts, who is particular about preparing his students for high school homework loads.
I am of the opinion that middle school is the time to make mistakes, and to learn time management and study skills.
Having said that, it is also true that middle school performance may determine high school placement. In our district, math level determines not only the high school Math sequence but science as well. Middle school performance at other courses that determine high school placement are language arts and foreign language. Again, in our district, high school level math and foreign language courses go into the high school transcript.
Possibly disingenuous question here: Why do people assume it’s OK to block out all kinds of time for a sport? A lot of posters on this thread seem to take it for granted that competitive athletics is a good thing that deserves a huge time commitment, and teachers should accommodate that. I’m not sure I buy that.
My own kids never liked sports, and played them only briefly. My daughter spent serious time on ballet in middle school, in part (but only in part) because she was getting athletics credit for it at her school, but it wasn’t as if we couldn’t see the end of the line in ballet approaching rapidly. By 10th grade she had walked away (from ballet, while continuing another dance discipline much less intensely, for fun); I was always resentful of some of the demands the ballet teachers made (not unlike coaches).
The ability of parents to over-ride the school course placement varies from district to district. In our district, admission to AP courses was by application. Teachers posted lists of the student numbers of the students they were accepting into the AP class. It is possible that a parent who was very effective at interacting with the administration could have over-ridden the teachers’ choices, but then I think the student would be in an AP class with a teacher who had not wanted them. (I don’t know if this was ever possible.) If the class was full numerically, there were union contract restrictions that prohibited the addition of any other students to the class.
So while middle school grades did not count a lot and did not appear on the high school transcript, they did have some influence on the later course trajectory.
@JHS if my kid didn’t swim or run 2 hours a day she would need ADD meds. I expect she will choose a career where she is outside and active but getting through the next few years of high school and college requires some hard exercise to compensate.
I would say it is not necessary and should try to avoid doing so. Imagine that after you have worked 8 hours at the office and still need to bring the work back home for another 2-4 hours to call for the day? And this is for the middle schoolers? This will the last few years for kids to be kids and the chances to discover themselves.
The motivation for the middle schoolers should be if they can manage to finish their homework within 1 to 2 hours, then the rest of the evening will free for them to do whatever they like; they will eventually to have better time management and study efficiency to prepare them ready for high school work than having a ton of homework and drag on all night. People’s attention span is about 15 -30 minutes at most,so having to do homework more than a couple hours, the margin of turn in learning is greatly reduced.
“Middle school grades are also commonly used for HS placement - kids are commonly denied AP or honors courses in HS if they did not do well in middle school. This affects their ability to earn a higher weighted GPA, which can shut them out of the potential for top 25% class rank. At some high schools, this means they’re looking at directional state or at lower tier colleges that do not offer significant merit or need based financial aid. So to many families, middle school grades matter a lot.”
I don’t think the system of HS implementation of MS’ performance to initially restrict AP/honor courses enrollment is to hinder students’ ability to achieve top 25% of class rank; in fact, it is used to protect students from too ambitiously taking too advanced classes beyond their abilities. As so many students post in CC that how they got C, D, F in AP classes in their Sophomore year and were so surprised and blinded by it. Without this measure, the failure rate would be much higher. And I see nothing wrong for go to a state college or lower tier colleges, where many of them are offering classes the quality of ivies and top 25s without the expensive tags.
This thread makes me truly happy that my kids don’t care about Ivy League schools or the AP class space race…
No wonder the trades are making a comeback.
@Time2Shine Ivy league obsession is problematic, but AP classes do help save your money in long run. The credits your children earn from the tests can help them skip the boring introductory classes and take more useful courses.
I, for example, had 44 AP credits and basically skipped a whole year worth of intro classes. I am a chemical engineering major with Spanish AND math minor, and even with those many AP credits I am still on my 4 year track. In fact, many engineer students take 5+ years to complete their programs!
Neither of my kids saved any money from APs. For my older son the sequencing of the CS and Math courses made it difficult (and he was having a great time and didn’t want to rush). For younger son the AP credits meant he could spend his entire junior year in Jordan, not just one semester. He loved it there.
BUt 2 hours of HW in middle school in NO WAY correlates with better preparation for AP classes.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
AT this point, this looks like a hit-and-run posting. The OP has been asked several follow-up questions, but has not logged back in. As the discussion is veering off topic into topics already covered on open threads, I am closing this one.