What such studies routinely ignore, however, is that what
instructors view as "reasonable" and entirely possible in a 1 hour session for a student
appropriately placed in the course, may NOT in fact be the case.
I know what
my DD can do with an hour.
I also know that for many of her seemingly high-achieving peers, that same output/level of mastery is more like a 2-4 hour endeavor.
At some point, parents
are going to need to face the fact that if their child NEEDS to spend four hours a night to manage a pair of AP classes, then that placement is
probably a reach for that child (assuming that there isn't a known reason that everyone is aware of and okay with).
I'm not convinced that teachers are actually intending for students to spend the kind of time that they are spending-- though to be fair, I'm not really sure what they DO expect in a math class that assigns 30 algebra or geometry problems nightly, or class reading that means more than 50 pages a night. That's going to take most students a long time.
Students themselves, of course, have long since cynically decided that teachers ALL seem to believe that their class is: a) the most important thing that the students have ever seen-- or will ever see, and that b) it's the only priority in the student's life. See? Two hours of homework? No problem. This is your only priority, after all.
Not saying that I think teachers DO think that. They don't. But they can be a teeeeeensy bit myopic on this score. Occasionally, I mean.
