Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Nonacademic Effects of Homework in High Schools

Personally, I would complain about a workload like that. Are they trying to burn these kids out before they even start college?

Wow. That seems... oh, what's the polite way of putting this?

Oh, the heck with it--

that seems delusional. I didn't expect that kind of time from college juniors. Because, see, I had sufficiently strong math skills to understand that if I had an expectation that should take me an hour, I could triple it for the median of the students in my class-- maybe quadruple for the lower-division students. So if it took me two hours to write up detailed solutions for a homework set? (Which I did do each week-- problems were de novo and therefore, until I made them up, there WERE no "solutions" to be had).

I expected that students, even working in a group, would require about six to eight hours of concerted effort on that homework set. Then add in writing up a lab (another two hours), reading for class (another two hours), and we're at a grand total of about 10-12 hours weekly for my class alone, not including the occasional speed bump or the term project, which required some additional outside-of-class time, and which I therefore attempted to push to a week where most faculty did NOT have a major assignment due...

To have even that kind of expectation of a high school student is delusional. My only explanation is that the high school teacher apparently isn't bright enough (or aware enough?) to understand that the students in the course have other demands upon their time.



Sorry that you're dealing with that, brilliantcp.

Some of these teachers are delusional. And if you can't cut it they just say you don't belong. That is exactly what goes on in my H.S. I know many VERY brilliant gifted juniors that are pulling all nighters just to finish their homework. Their stress level is over the top. They never get any time to let their hair down and just hang out with friends. There is no way they can possibly do everything all their teachers expect of them. Especially these weeks approaching the AP tests. My guess is this physics teacher realized there is only a few more weeks left and is trying to cram the students with what is left of the book.

Yes.
DD has had several good teachers at this school, but there seem to also be a large number of teachers that think gifted students can just whiz through any amount of homework. I would excuse this (sort of) if the teacher had just started this crazy level of homework in the ramp up to AP testing, but this has gone on all year long. Many of the classes have a high percentage of the grade as homework, so knowing the material is not sufficient.

I think that having all the homework online might contribute to the crazy amounts from this teacher. Although the teacher may have to put the assignment together, it is all graded by the homework website for classes like physics. When the homework is a ready made unit like a practice AP test or chapter review it may seem smaller than it really is--the teacher can just post and the system takes care of it.

Less understandable are the teachers that assign three five page essays over the weekend. I can't even imagine reading 90+ five page essays from DD's class of 30 students. The only up side is that DD can now really crank out a five page essay. Any topic, any subject, any number of facts thrown in for one low price...

Other parents and myself, we've speculated that part of the problem is that there are teachers who simply haven't gone to the trouble to add it all up-- not really. So they THINK that they know what it is that they're assigning, but in pragmatic terms, they haven't really thought it through.


Most of my DD's teachers don't DO the work that their students are asked to do-- for the precise reason that brilliantcp notes-- it's autograded, and they don't really "handle" it other than as a-- well, a "facilitator" I think is how many of them see themselves at this juncture.

In an online school setting, this is somewhat more defensible than in a brick-and-mortar one, I have to say.

I can imagine reading that kind of volume because it was my lot pretty much every term-- at the end of finals week, when I had as little as 36 hours to get through it all before submitting grades. I surely wouldn't have signed myself up for it otherwise, though.

Here's the problem that I have noticed among my DD's cohort, though-- there are too many classmates whose ONLY hope of passing the AP class is to do it with volume rather than quality... ergo, volume and the willingness/ability to shoulder super-human AMOUNTS of work is the route to a good grade. The classes themselves now no longer revolve around "rigor" in the authentic sense, but around Rigor in the FAUX sense-- and with it, a crazy amount of busywork, studded with authentic assignments.

I'm glad that DD doesn't have to turn in her stupid outlines or do dozens of nightly math problems. She just takes assessments, and has to KNOW the material for them, and has to produce quality writing (though we see some of the same things in the writing assignments-- too many of them, and most of them encouraging nothing more than buzzword bingo or blather).

And therein lies my primary objection to AP classes - I can see this only getting worse as more political sows' ears are inflated into silk purses.

And this is why my DS15, a freshman, won't be taking APUSH next year. Its the only AP offered to sophomores and it's one of these killer classes. He just can't crank out essays at the speed they are asking. He can write a good essay, he just can't do it fast enough. And his teachers know it so he won't be accepted. Honestly, I'm glad since he hates having to write detailed outlines of the text book, and APUSH requires them to do that. He is the type of kid who can read the text book once and then ace the test and doesn't see the use of all this outlining and copying. He will be frustrated and bored next year in regular US History, but it's going to keep him from getting overloaded. I hope honors science, pre-calc, and marching band will help keep it tolerable.

And what is ridiculous is that all that outlining isn't required in a REAL college class. My college world history class (a freshman class) was here is the text book, here are the lectures in a two hundred student auditorium, write one term paper on THe Man for All Seasons, take three exams....half the exam was made up of multiple choice question and half the exam were short essays.

Find the busy work in that class....none...in the syllabus he had listed extra reading for those who wanted additional reading...but that was optional. That is what a real college class is like...sink or swim on three exams and a paper...not outline the crap out of two textbooks and additional readings and do hours of made up assignments of homework each night.

I read the textbook ahead of each lecture, took notes in class, I tended to rewrite my notes each night with the textbook open to that chapter and worked on my term paper a little each weekend. Easy.

To let students skip unnecessary work in an AP class, you could factor in AP exam scores into class grades, either in a linear way

class_grade = w1*AP_exam_score + w2*coursework_grade

or in a nonlinear way

class_grade = max(AP_exam_score,coursework_grade)

where a student who does not do all the coursework but still gets a 5 on the AP exam gets an A for the course. Teachers may not welcome grading systems that reduce their control.

Except that AP scores don't come back until July, so this really wouldn't work for seniors. Though I do agree that the test score is probably a better indicator of mastery of material than the course grade.