Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy rant about middle school homework

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.

Honestly... I would sit down and look at what % of the grade these homework assignments are... and just flat out not do some of them.

Is it possible to enlist the music director to help talk to these teachers? 20hrs of homework over the weekend is just ridiculous.

poor kid...that did deserve a rant...I hope something positive comes out of the experience.

I agree with mentioning it to the music director maybe in a phone call to gage perspective better. These kids made the school look good to go to that program and are likely good students across the board (music kids typically are : - ) !!)

Can't help but it does sound very unreasonable. Do you know any of the parents of the other kids? Did they have the same problem.

As bad as it was, it is best not to discourage her efforts. In high school, it pays off well to do your best. My DD15 works hard to get A's and I appreciate her effort - especially in boring work such as outlining chapters.

I know. I'd probably be much more upset if she didn't care and she didn't try. I just don't like seeing her so stressed out.

As for mentioning it to the music director, he said that the teachers resent that the kids miss class time for various festivals and audition-based programs. He doesn't think that asking them to give the kids a break will have any positive effect. And yes, the large majority of these kids are top students with good grades.

We ran into this much more in middle school than now that the kids are in high school. Maybe it's that more kids are doing other things, maybe it's that high school is less project-oriented, maybe it's that our middle school had an overwhelming number of prima donnas per square inch. But neither of my kids (both AP/honors track, but with different teachers) has more than an hour or so of homework per night, and almost never on weekends.