I find it remarkable how widely the homework load varies among the teachers at my son's school. The science teacher doesn't believe in homework for middle schoolers and very rarely gives it. My son has learned more in her class than in his other classes combined this year. It is amazing how much learning she packs into her time with them.

Then there is the English teacher. He spends the entire time doing next to nothing. But he expected them to do NaNoWriMo in November--which was two hours every night (every single night including weekends!) just for English for that month.

We are homeschooling math this year, but last year when we didn't, you could count on an hour each night. For some reason the lecture took the entire class period and the teacher never had the kids do practice problems in class--so it would come home and my son had no idea how to do the problems because he had never actually done them before--it would take me 5 minutes to explain and have him do a problem on his own and then he was good to go. Now why couldn't the teacher do it that way?

Foreign language seems to be the only place where the homework is consistent, manageable, and purposeful. He gets maybe 10-20 minutes each night.

The thing that really bothers me is that his school "academizes" art and electives. There is homework every night in art, and it frequently involves *writing* of all things. Really? And the elective my son is taking this semester has several hours of homework each week even though school policy is not to have homework in electives. I don't understand why they can't get this stuff done in class.

And to top it off, the school imposes requirements on nonschool time. Kids are required to participate in a certain number of hours of after school activities and community service.

This is for 8th grade, BTW.

I agree with HowlerKarma that teachers might not know how long it will take a novice with lower that adult level processing speed to do what they assign. I've found as a homeschooler that for most assignments it will take my kids 2-4 times longer than it takes me to do the same amount of work.

I also agree with puffin that teachers aren't using class time efficiently. It's just easier to mess around in class and have the parents enforce the real learning. At least that's how it looks to me.