Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments High school and busy work

This sounds like good reason to be concerned. Does she have a therapist or is there someone she could get an evaluation with? This is stuff to take seriously.

It sounds kind of adjustment disorderish. Probably caused by the significant stress, which means that the stress needs to be reduced.

I do take it fairly seriously b/c I was seriously depressed in my teen years and wound up missing part of my senior year spending time in the hospital for a suicide attempt. I don't want to wind up there.

My gut feeling is that if the environment changed, her outlook would significantly improve. I hate to be a problem this early in the semester, but I have left a msg for her counselor. I don't know what more they can do but the few options I can come up with are --

* reduce the amount of work; for instance not making her do all three copies of the history assignment (rough draft #1 plus coloring, rough draft #2 plus coloring, final draft plus coloring -- none of this can be typed or photocopied; the pictures have to be redrawn and recolored over and over).

* take her out and have her do something like an online high school and supplemental courses @ the community college.

* have her repeat a year of 8th grade somewhere else so the work is so easy that she can coast for a bit.

I'm hesitant on the last one b/c she is so advanced academically (she's consistently in the 99th percentile in most areas as compared to grade peers) and the fit socially has been tremendously better post-skip.

Honestly, none of this work is too hard for her. She doesn't feel like she's learned much at this point and is actually finding Geometry quite easy (math is usually her weakest subject). It is quantity that is the issue not difficulty. Of course, things may get more challenging as the year goes on.

Sorry to hear that Cricket. That sounds like busywork for sure.

Colouring in at her age for homework in anything is beyond ridiculous. At this stage, I would be writing a letter to the teaacher who assigned it, copied to the principal, saying that it's the cause of great stress to your DD because of the time it takes, and that because you can't see educational value commensurate with that time, she will not be doing such work in future. Maybe the other kids' low performance in group work is partly a sign that they too are suffering from this? At any rate, I bet you aren't the only parent feeling angry about this.

At our top-ranked local public high school, they say there is supposedly 3 hours per night per AP class! Some of the Tiger Mom kids take 3 AP classes at a time. AP classes here are weighted as a "5" (if you get an A), whereas regular classes are weighted as a "4" for an A.
The average GPA of accepted students to a UC school last year was 4.20 on a 4.00 GPA scale. How can that be??? Maybe part of what you are seeing is that she is young for her grade, with grade skips, and she is not able to keep up right now with the busywork that comes with these higher level course?

The course w/ the most homework, though, is her world history class and that is the one where she is not taking pre-AP. 9th grade only offers pre-AP not AP and I don't think that you get the extra GPA point for pre-AP. She's taking pre-AP in English and Bio and is also taking the 10th grade science class (that one isn't available in pre-AP, thankfully!).

One conversation we're going to have tonight is that her bio grade is suffering significantly b/c the history class is taking up so much time that she hasn't had time to study for the one quiz they had and forgot to bring an assignment with her to class b/c she had the due date down wrong so that one garnered a really low grade b/c she rushed and tried to replicate it in a few mins at the begining of class. She really needs to get her grade up in that class.

I'd just stop doing the coloring in history and deal with the lower grades for turning in black and white pencil drawings and redirect my attn to bio. If she gets some Bs or Cs in history, she has enough of a cushion to hopefully keep that grade at least at an A- (its an A+ now).

I will have to keep that in mind for my DD when she's older. I've been pretty appalled at what people are describing as "pre-AP" workload.

I graduated in the early 1990s from a school that offered no AP classes, petitioned the school board to take 7 (or maybe 8? I forget) classes in a 6-period day, and got into an Ivy League college, where I had no issue with the workload. And other than preparation for speech competitions, I don't remember having any homework at all. Maybe a couple of calculus problems, but for the most part, the assignment was on the board at the start of class, and I could have it done by the end of class.

It's not clear to me why you'd spend an hour in class every day + 3 hours of homework a night for 180 school days (720 hours), in order to get the same amount of knowledge you could reasonably expect to get from a 3-credit-hour college class (60 minutes of class per credit, plus 2 hours of out-of-class work per hour, times 3 credits, times 16 weeks = 48 hours). High school seniors are not that much slower than college freshmen, you know? More is not synonymous with better.

ETA: Maybe I'll need to keep that in mind sooner than I think. "Pre-AP" starts in middle school / 6th grade, and requires a signed contract, a prohibition on switching out of the AP level other than at semesters, and carries a warning:

She can't switch classes at this point. She can drop non-essential classes such as photography or the 10th grade earth systems science class and take study hall instead up until something like next week, but she cannot, for instance, drop pre-AP bio and take regular bio or change regular history for pre-AP history.

I left a msg for her counselor last night to call me. The counselor apparently pulled dd out today to talk to her and her suggestion is dropping one of the aforementioned classes and taking study hall. Dd isn't too keen on that but it might not be a bad idea. Dd's reasoning is that she has A+s in both of those classes, they don't have a lot of homework, and she really loves photo. Also, she's not the best @ doing homework in school with the distractions of other students in a study hall and isn't sure how much she'd catch up that way.

It is the only solution they have to offer, though, and reducing homework load isn't something they are willing to put in a 504 apparently. Dd said that the counselor suggested that she approach her teachers individually and try to see if she can negotiate something like that.

How is that working? Did you enroll him at an online high school and also have him take some courses at a local community college or university? Or are you officially listed as a homeschooler and supplementing with college courses? Do you have to pay for the college courses?

Our local uni does have an age requirement (I've checked recently). They told me that students must be 17 by day one of the class. Dd won't even make that if she graduates high school on the path she's on now. The community college, on the other hand, does not have an age requirement for enrollment. If she's enrolled through the local school system, they pay for the community college courses but if she's not, I believe that we have to pay full tuition for them. I'd have to check to see if an online school would cover the cost of college courses.