DD participated in a district music program that required her to miss a day of school last week. I swear that the teachers wanted to punish the kids who took part in this program. In addition to her make up work, the teachers piled on a tremendous amount of homework this weekend. DD did homework everyday this weekend for several hours. She skipped going skiing with the family, skipped her normal music lesson but did go to a friend's slumber party. She probably put in about 20 hours on homework over the three day weekend. She was less productive the day after her sleepover but still trudged through some homework that required less brain power, i.e graphing. I believe her when she tells me that she did not procrastinate on any of this and that the teachers were unwilling to give her work ahead of time to make up for the day she missed. She was so strung out and stressed after this weekend that her stomach was in knots last night and she couldn't sleep.
This is a kid who pushes herself to do her best. We do have some perfectionism issues but I don't think that they are out of control here. I asked if there were some projects where she could do "good enough" work and spend less time on them. She said that she didn't know how to do less on something like math because she just does the problem once. On vocabulary, she said that she has to learn the word well enough to write a sentence -- how should she do less? On science and language arts, she needed to watch videos of the lectures and take notes which the teachers review. She also had homework in her elective (a home ec equivalent) that was something that she didn't put in a huge amount of effort but once again it took some time and some effort. She tried to do the minimum here but it still required a bunch of time. I'm not even sure what else she did. It makes me so sad to see her so strung out after she worked so hard. It made her acceptance into the music program feel more like a punishment than an honor.
