Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Atlantic article on excessive homework

This month's Atlantic has an article about excessive homework. It has all the usual suspects and some other stuff too.

For example, the author's daughter also loses points on her homework if she doesn't put her answers in the right places. This suggests to me that teacher is only looking at answers and not at the process used to get there.

For math class, his daughter had to calculate the distance from Sacramento to all other state capitals (in miles and kilometers). When dad protested that the assignment seemed somewhat less than useful, the teacher argued that his daughter needed to learn her state capitals. When he said, "But that's not math," she told him that combining subject areas is popular these days.

Looks like my DD's Ms. T. isn't the only one. How sad.

This reminded me of the endless nights when DSS20 was still in high school. Add a learning disability on top of it and oh, what a nightmare all that homework was!

I identified with this article all too well. DD9 has about 1.5 hours of HW a night--2 hours if she's not particularly on task (and what 9yo is 100% on task all the time?) That does include reading time, but still.

When I was a schoolkid (not in the USA) we didn't have homework. I think the idea was that you learn in the classroom. I think that's good idea.

Now we are in the USA we are homeschooling so there's still no homework.

We see far less homework from the full TD program than we did in the mixed classes. The public HG program sends no homework home.

The US Dept of Ed has a position that 3-5 problems are all that are needed to practice and show you know. Seeing that there are 50 state capitals....that is 10 times the number of problems necessary. That is just a ridiculous assignment. I would not be above after my child did 5 of each type (miles and kilometers), doing the rest for him/her.

My mom used to do all my word searches for me because I just.couldn't.do.it. And I had one every week in sixth grade for vocabulary. It was beyond my scanning ability and wasn't an activity that helped me with my vocabulary. And today I can do word searches just fine.

I wish I could find where I read the three to five problems quote.

Our school district has a 'no homework' policy. I think it works great when a child has proactive parents who ask for extra work in areas their child is struggling. Not so much for the child with lax parents. Leading into the second problem... how do you tell your child is struggling if you NEVER see their work. I think this is part if the reason it took us so long to realize that DD had a learning disability. There was little homework and the teachers did not notice she was struggling in class. It wasn't until she emptied her desk at the end of grade 3 that I had a chance to see where she struggled.

We compensate for the 'no homework' by having DD work with a math tutor and spending 30 minutes each night on self-directed learning apps. On the plus side, it gives her more time to learn about things that interest her.

My recollection of the research is the HW has little to no benefit till middle school or so, and even then, it's only for things like math and possibly science--subjects where concrete practice increases mastery.

I wouldn't mind if DD had a sheet or two of math and was assigned to read nightly (though she does that anyway). I actually think the special projects they do are cool, so those are fine too. But the rest of it is busywork and drudgery. Part of the reason DD does not play an instrument is that she and I both know that adding 30 minutes of practice time would eat into the little bit of free time she has left after school (she does belong to some clubs she enjoys). She's 9. That's awful.

That state capitals math assignment will come in handy one day, when the internet is broken, all the libraries are burned down, and knowing the capital of New Hampshire is the difference between life and death.

Or not.

You don't have to wait until middle school for this sort of thing, though. My DD was 6 when she played on a soccer team full of kids from a particular religious private school, and a common conversation was the hours of homework their kids were doing. These little ones were typically getting 6-8 hours of sleep a night. This was creating battles to do the homework and get through it, then get up the next morning.

I wondered aloud why they paid people to do this to their children. Nobody had a good answer.

Dude, you're making my side hurt.

Okay, while I do think knowing the capitals is a good thing for kids to learn, calculating the distance to everyone one of them seems like a pretty useless waste of time, unless you keep getting the calculation wrong.

That private school is the reason I am really hoping my DD10 wants to homeschool next year because that is our option 2 that I really don't want to use. She also knows her friend in ballet who goes to that school always has books with her because she is always trying to get her homework done.

Well, be realistic.


All of those seven-to-ten-year olds had better be brought up to snuff somehow before they get into high school.

After all, how else are they going to manage the workload in those seventy AP classes that they need to take, hmm?

{gasp} What?? You don't plan for your four year old to be taking more than a couple of those?? {shakes head sadly}

Oh my... your poor child... Doomed to a Life of Mediocrity and Worse by your inability to understand the Glossy and Impressive Competitive Benefits Which Shall Accrue as a result of Highly Prestigious and Rigorous High School Coursework(tm). You can't start thinking about (elite) college too soon, you know.



What? Nobody else sees this connection? It's operant conditioning. Revolting, to be sure, when the subjects are children. But it's the only way that they'll eventually be able to endure (well some of them can) 6+ nightly hours of high school homework. How else will we know who the valedictorians are?!

(No. I am not kidding. Well, I am-- obviously-- but not about the 6+ hours or the sort mechanism.)

HK, the story for why DD needs all that HW is "to prepare for middle school." I think last year it was "to prepare for 4th grade."

Of course, she CAN do it, because she doesn't have ADHD, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, etc and despite being immature and anxious, etc., she is relatively organized and responsible. The kids in her grade who DO have LDs (and they exist--the GT program, to its credit, definitely does not exclude them) are barely keeping their heads above water. The only thing I can say is that, um, there seems to be a lot of grade inflation? Is that a positive?? What I mean is, the kids who are tanking the homework are not failing.

In a survey, Harvard students said the following about how much they studied in high school and anticipated studying in college. Their high school workloads looked reasonable.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/9/5/freshman-survey-academics-extracurriculars/
Freshman Survey Part III: Classes, Clubs, and Concussions
The Class of 2017's Academic and Extracurricular Lives
By MADELINE R. CONWAY and CORDELIA F MENDEZ, CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
September 5, 2013


The survey has attracted some media attention because 10% of incoming Harvard students surveyed admitted to cheating on tests in high school (42% on homework). I wonder how that compares to college students in general.

"Homework" and "studying" are two very different things.

If my DD's friends and peers are anything to go by-- a lot of them rationalize not-quite-cheating (that is, what THEY consider to not "really" be cheating) by offering up the idea that if they didn't cheat, they honestly feel that no human being is capable of doing what is sometimes/often asked. In some instances, students actually articulate that they feel that it's OBVIOUS that cheating is intended, at least tacitly.

I know that I've also seen that sentiment associated with such studies before.
To be clear, my family and I see nothing defensible about academic malfeasance of any kind, and we have a great deal of disdain for it. If you have to cheat, you have by definition just admitted your own incompetence. It saddens me that this conclusion seems to be slipping over time.

Now, I'm certainly not defending the practices that the father in this article is illustrating... BUT... having read the specifics of what was being demanded, I have to also say that my DD, at 10 (when she was a freshman in high school) would have been polishing off that entire evening in about two hours flat, maybe less. But then again, she is HG+. So.

There is a component to this that parents like our erstwhile Homework Dad don't really want to examine too hard. That is, that not all kids ARE "elite" material. His daughter seems to be struggling (though not terribly hard) to keep up with the workload. My question is-- why is he not seeing this as an indicator that maybe this placement demands too much for her to keep up with?

I understand his angst. The work itself isn't the problem-- it's the output demand that is the issue. That is a separate issue, but it's the one underlying this phenomenon; there is no more depth. Only volume. That is what "GT" means now in secondary in almost every instance I've personally seen. It's rigid, inflexible, and very much like a sausage-grinding operation-- I'm reminded of the line from Dune; Spice must flow.

We've struggled with this throughout my DD's school career ourselves. But I knew better than to think that I was going to be successful in reducing that volume through complaints about it. Output demand has always been the limiting factor in my DD's academic placement. She could DO the material in AP Comp as a nine year old. She just couldn't keep up with the written output demands and all of the assessments daily.

But here's the part that I'm perplexed by-- why on earth is HomeworkDad not doing something about this toxicity? Why didn't he see this coming? We did. We opted NOT to place our DD into high school at a point in her life when she could not realistically keep up with those output demands.

This goes along with the topic quite well. I'm still laughing! lol http://www.huffingtonpost.com/clair...html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false

What do you think he should do?

Because this is my future. It's already my life, to some extent. I don't want to homeschool--at all. My kids are in the best placement possible for them, as far as I can tell. We have politely expressed our dissatisfaction with the HW level at the school.

I DO see it coming, HK. But I don't see a way out.

To be clear, I believe my kids will handle what is thrown at them. DD is a straight A student--top of her grade. But I think it's going to suck.

Yes - I saw this on FB and thought someone should post it here, but forgot to do so. Mind you, come to think of it... My DS's (high achieving) school has a very welcome no-homework policy, which is what lets DS play two instruments and do an AoPS course out of school and spend nearly two hours travelling every day and not quite go crazy - and I DO send work in with him; his AoPS challenge problems!

As for why this dad hasn't done something about it - I don't think it's nearly that easy. Home education isn't an option, never mind a good option, for all families, school choice is limited and involves compromises, schools may or may not be receptive to requests for flexibility...

I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at here, HK. It's not like there's a choice. College track = excessive homework, just as rigor = more homework. And HomeworkDad's daughter is in 8th grade. Eighth graders aren't exactly given a lot of choice about their schedules. It seems unfair to question the girls abilities or HomeworkDad's assessment when the system is the problem. What's the point of making 98 calculations about distances to state capitals? Or of reading 79 pages of a novel in one evening while also pulling out three "important and powerful quotes" and analyzing their significance? These assignments are frivolous.


Plus, HomeworkDad did do something about it. He communicated with the other parents in his daughter's class. And he got hauled into a meeting with the vice principal and accused of cyberbullying for his efforts. So then he wrote an article in a high-profile magazine. It seems to me like he's trying. Hard. IMO, nothing will change until this problem moves into the popular consciousness, and people like the author of the article and of books on the subject are trying to create a solution.

TBH, the whole system strikes me as being guided by irrationality. I agree with you completely about lack of depth. US schools seem to use volume to compensate for this problem. This is hardly surprising in a system where a "highly qualified" teacher is defined as a having any bachelor's degree, rather than a subject-specific one.

I am thankful that even though dd 8th grade seems to be in an environment that would breed this type of excessive hw, she doesn't appear to actually have excessive hw. I don't think it takes her more than an hour, some nights less, and even with instrument practice and not getting home until 5 she still has time to watch her favorite shows and get enough sleep. I hear it will suck big time next year with the volume of work in the AP classes. I think it will be a very rude awakening. But I don't think increasing the volume now to prepare for it is the answer.

Thank you! This is hilarious. Just started it, and once she said laundry I about lost it.

Most students are not spending too much time on homework. According to

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/how-much-homework-do-american-kids-do/279805/
How Much Homework Do American Kids Do?
Various factors, from the race of the student to the number of years a teacher has been in the classroom, affect a child's homework load.
The Atlantic
JULIA RYAN
SEP 19 2013, 9:04 AM ET

In 2007, the average number of hours per week spent on homework by high school students (grades 9 to 12) was

6.8 all
6.8 whites
6.3 blacks
6.4 Hispanics
10.3 Asians

According to the Met Life survey "THE HOMEWORK EXPERIENCE A SURVEY OF STUDENTS, TEACHERS AND PARENTS" (Figure 2.4), http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED500012.pdf
only 12% of students in grade 7-12 spent 2.5, 3, or more hours a day on homework, and only 11% of "A" students did. As I wrote earlier, most Harvard students studied for 19 hours or less a week in high school.

This comment struck me as particularly pithy:


While flippant and not a little harsh (after all, his daughter IS keeping up okay with the expectations, though I might argue somewhat about the "memorization" credo, this is only because I've seen what it leads to in post-secondary students); it's not entirely incorrect in its conclusions.


Honestly-- the ONLY thing to do about this sort of toxicity is walk away for a less toxic (hopefully even a "healthy") alternative. That definition is going to vary tremendously from parent to parent and child to child. I'm just stunned that he signed up for this and is now unhappy because-- well, apparently because he didn't understand what he was getting his daughter into. Not sure on that point.

As noted up-thread-- my DD would not have found this workload that onerous. She does FAR more in terms of work output, and did even then (as an 8th grader). Yes, it's some busywork-- but looking at the details provided, not THAT much. It's different than the described state capitals assignment from the previous (also selective?) school. I question, at least somewhat, the ability of even most very bright 8th grade students to grasp the finer points of the McCourt or Alexie novels being studied (other than as stylistic examples of memoir), but otherwise this seems quite reasonable to me. Personally, I mean.

After all, this is a selective charter school; it is a school of choice. So choose something ELSE, for heaven's sakes.

What on earth makes this kind of thing WORTH the cost?? Seriously-- answer that question honestly for a minute. What is he hoping that his children will garner from this experience?

I see many, many parents around here who subject their children to this kind of punitive regimen in the hopes of getting them into an "elite college" in order to... well, something vague about success, apparently meaning high earning power or television appearances or something.

I'm not entirely opposed to the neural plasticity thinking about academic ability and achievement, but I see this as inherently being about the egalitarianism espoused by writers like Gladwell, and taken to toxic extremes. No, not everyone can be in the "top" whatever-percentile. No matter how hard they work. "High expectations" also need to be "realistic" expectations, but there's definitely something missing there at this point. IMO.

Walk away to where?

You've described some pretty toxic situations with your DD's school. Why didn't you walk away? Did you know in advance that those problems would happen?

Some people can't walk away. They have nowhere to go. This guy is in New York City. His option might be to bus his daughter to a crappy school across town and 80 blocks north or south. So the choices might very well be "learn little or nothing" or "work all evening." The problem is the system.

And things are rarely so simple that walking away is an option, even if there's a decent school close by. My own DD's math situation is toxic, but everything else about her school is wonderful. Plus, she has wonderful friends there and wants to go to high school and college with them. In her case, walking away could create more problems than staying. So I advocate, just like HomeworkDad is. The system is the problem.

Bostonian, yes, not everyone gets a lot of homework. But those kids aren't the problem here. The ones getting overloaded are. If I sprain my ankle, I can't ignore it just because other people's ankles are fine.

ETA: or to make the point more pertinent, I can't ignore the needs of my gifted kid just because the average IQ is 100.

You're still assuming there's an environment they could walk away to that would be less toxic - not just differently toxic. That's not obvious. I think you're sitting in a position of having found a solution you think close to ideal for your DD and failing to understand that others may not have as good a choice available. I'm also very lucky in having a good solution for my DS right now - but choosing where he goes next is likely to involve a choice of problems that for him may be as bad as that homework. Frankly I feel offended by the wider implications of your words, and would expect parents already living with the best of a bunch of unsatisfactory choices to feel more offended.

Well, I'm not sure HomeworkDad is being entirely honest- my DD is also an 8th grader in New York, (though not in NYC). Now, it's possible that in NYC, the land where every kid is gifted, things are different, but in the state of NY, at least 2 of the courses she lists are technically 9th grade courses, which appear on the high school transcript and include Regents Exam finals (a statewide exam system here in Ny). My DD is also taking both algebra and earth science, and for both, one had to be recommended by previous teachers to take the class (granted, it seems like about half her class somehow got recommended for algebra, resulting in a painfully repetitive and slow class, but that is an issue for a separate thread). So his DD is technically taking at least two accelerated classes, which would be considered high school courses. Now, perhaps taking their charter school entrance exam and gaining a spot in this school suggests that these kids can handle acceleration. But to complain about the work, after seeking a spot in the school (and allowing his second daughter to do the same) seems problematic to me.

(For what it's worth, we have not had similar problems with homework load, though I would not be surprised if some of DD's classmates did).

Remember that the exam high schools in NYC are notorious for giving entering freshmen this choice:

Pick two out of three for the next four years:

1. Academics
2. Friends
3. Sleep

You can't pick all three.


It isn't clear to me why rigor = more homework or why acceleration = more homework. The question isn't "Can the student learn the material?" The question is "Why does the student need to have so much homework?"

But we are already living that ourselves.

We've chosen, for whatever it's worth, to make a lot of parental sacrifices in order to find any workable solution. There are only two given the solution space that we're working in-- homeschool or what we're doing now. Neither of those is even what I'd call "good" by any stretch of the imagination.

I'm far from smug about this, and I don't deny for an instant that the system IS a large part of the problem. But that system would not continue to exist at all if parents were not still buying into it.
This is what I see locally-- parents are buying into it. They are opting in for competitive reasons, ultimately. Not because the other options are more toxic-- but because they perceive that those alternatives would/will place their kids at some kind of competitive disadvantage down the road. It's why they are not choosing "sleep" from the list of options available.

Cricket is exactly on-target there. It was precisely what I picked up on in reading Dad's account of things. He's complaining because it isn't perfect. For HIM.




That, ultimately, is my point. We could walk away-- any of us COULD. This is, when you get down to it, a very first-world sort of problem.

True. But the statistics I cited suggest to me that state or federal policies to combat excessive homework could do more harm than good, because arguably the overall problem, especially for high school students, is not enough homework being done. When too much homework is a problem, parents will need to complain at the school level.

Agreed. Some parents are buying into it. BUT NOT ALL OF US.



Disagreed.

The guy who wrote that article didn't give me the impression of being a whiner. But it's possible that you're perceiving him the way that gifted-kid parents are seen when advocating for their kids.

My tenth-grade son is doing his daily dose of 30-50 math problems right now, and they tend to be same-y. My daughter (just 9) averaged 20-30 per night last year and the year before that, except they weren't same-y. They were pretty much carbon copies of each other. They were easy, taught her little, yet they took a lot of time just to write out. Especially when you have to "show your work."

With my other son (DS11), it's reams of vocabulary words that he's unlikely to hear or use again until he's 16 or older. Many of these words are SAT/GRE words. "Diffident" isn't exactly in the realm of a 6th grader, even one with an impressive vocabulary.

I have not "bought into" this situation. I hate it. I complain about it to the school. I talk to other parents. But I have no choice. There is simply no other high school around here that will not pile on homework. The neighborhood elementary schools don't seem to pile it on, but...they would prefer to see my 5th grade daughter in 3rd grade because of her birthday.

I'm kind of surprised at these reactions. As parents of gifties, we know how rigid the schools are. People on this board commonly use phrase "least worst option." Too much homework is toxic. It robs kids of time to play and be creative. And what are they doing all day in school that they have to keep working for 2-4 hours each night?

Yes, part of my son's math and science classes this year includes spelling and vocabulary. I suppose I can see that, in part, for science but in no way should it be considered math.

And yes, he loses points for not titling the page, showing work, putting answers in the wrong place, etc. This year (4th grade) seems to have kicked those kinds of nits into high gear. While I understand it is important to follow rules to an extent, it does seem trivial as well.

More importantly, though, my son has a fabulous teacher this year who seems to get him (esp with regard to math). More than makes up for the other trivial issues so far.

Val, I'm entirely with you, FWIW.


Yes. My DD has ZERO problem learning the material at her school (which is a GT magnet but I think you all know that). Actually, much of it is too easy, but it's the closest we can come to an appropriate placement; before we moved her she was having to read Frog and Toad and add 2 + 2 in 1st and about ready to stab her eyeballs out.

She does have problems completing all that effing homework, though. But we could have kept her at Old School, which had much less HW. Should we have? She says this one is "WAY better," "because I actually learn some things" "even though I have too much homework." She also has peers and real friends, which she did not at old school. Which would you choose?

I haven't read all the replies, and have no desire to get into the throws of the debate over whether or not most students have too much homework - I believe that unstructured down-time is important for our children. OTOH, I wouldn't choose this particular article as the starting point for a battle-cry to rage against the amount of homework students are receiving across the US, for a few reasons.

The first thing that struck me when reading the article is that the amount and type of homework described sounds very similar to the amount and type of homework our middle school assigns each night and which is not expected to take more than 10 minutes per grade per year (so an 8th grader would expected to spend 80 minutes max on homework. This formula works out fairly well for my kids - my ds' homework takes about 3 hours on a typical night - but it's not the actual homework that takes a long time, it's fall-out from his writing disability that causes homework time to take him longer than most of his peers at school.

So my first thought when reading the article was that perhaps the HomeworkDad's daughter was struggling with work she wasn't really ready for.

I also don't particularly appreciate the "memorize" attitude - in my own life (which is of course, only a sample of one and not anything to draw conclusions from..).. I've found that homework (or any kind of work) goes *faster* when you understand what you're doing. As a parent, I'd not automatically assume that my child had to fly right to "memorize to get by" mode until I fully understood what was expected and what was going on in school. One really important piece of information missing from this article was the amount of time the teachers estimated students should be spending on each bit of homework. If the teachers are assigning homework that (in their estimation) should be taking less time, and my child is telling me that it's all about memorization, I'd be looking at what's up with my child's learning situation first before condemning the system-wide approach to homework.

I also am not surprised that it took a lot of time, effort, and frustration for HomeworkDad to do his daughter's homework - he's not in school studying those courses, listening to the teacher's lectures, participating in classwork during the day - so he has none of the background prep going into his homework sessions that the actual students have. He's also far-removed from his own middle school days, and he's not in a career where he is actively using either Algebra or Earth Science skills - so I wouldn't expect him to be as quick-on-his-toes at working Algebra problems or prepping for a science test as I would expect a student to be.

He's also admitted he wasn't a stellar student himself back in middle school

So that's just my take on it. I empathize with you Val, and with other parents who's children are bogged down with too much homework - but I wouldn't be quoting this specific article as particularly supportive of that concern in a meaningful way.

polarbear

The school in the article would have gotten an earful from me with their insipid and beyond inappropriate attempt to stamp out free speech and right to assembly under the guise of preventing cyber bullying. Finally, they could learn the appropriate place to put those mounds of redundant home-busywork.

School is for opening young minds, not conditioning them to dormancy through useless tasks.

He gave specifics that indicate that he's complaining about a homework workload which is less than 1/4th of what you just listed for your 9yo, Val.



What he reported (not in the first school, but the Lab school, which is an exam school in NYC, yes?) seemed not at all unreasonable to me.
THAT is why I think that yeah, he's being a bit whiny.

I also strongly suspect that the 79p reading assignment was a matter of a reading assignment which was intended for 3 evenings, not one-- or was intended not as a FIRST read-through, but as a second one specifically for the purpose of pulling out quotes. DD did quite similar activities in middle school. Not excessive, and not necessarily busywork.

What Val describes is not even comparable to what the Dad in this article is listing.

He specifically describes algebra homework which is 10-11 problems per evening, yes? Assume for a moment that this is two, maybe three types of problems-- seems entirely in line with the idea of reasonable repetition for mastery of the concept.


I just don't see this parent as anything but a different sub-category of the parents who-- being honest in my opinion-- tend to ruin authentic GT classes with their fervor to get their kids into them.

Well, if it can't be hard, (because then not very many students can actually DO the work) then it still needs to FEEL hard. Voila-- the body double of rigor, there, is volume of output.

That's not really appropriately meeting anyone's needs, of course. The GT students NEED what most students can't legitimately do. The others need instruction that is meaningfully on their level, too, and could really do without all of the more-more-more-more frenzy.

I just don't think that is really what this author was accurately reporting. Val-- YOUR kids' situation seems like the real thing to me. So does what our local high schools do to kids in honors/college-prep. But this seems kind of tame, honestly. He's reporting EXCESSIVE homework, via time-to-completion, and I'm seeing that the details of this homework shouldn't be taking that long if this student is appropriately placed (apparently taking high school college-prep coursework). Which-- um, is what the teacher told him, too.

Basically, I interpret that as "Sorry, this class IS hard. Maybe it's too hard for your kid."

Don't we all wish that administrators and teachers WOULD do a bit more of that rather than watering down content?



I also think that he's being a little sensationalistic here. It's a modern twist on the similar wry editorials about "ha-ha- I can't do my fifth grader's math homework because I don't understand it, how ridiculous is that?" that were in vogue in the 60's-70's.

I had the same thought. In fact, I would have told the veep that, in pretending that my email discussion amounted to cyber bullying in order to shame and silence dissent, he was the one doing the bullying. When he said the teacher felt threatened, I would have demanded that he immediately point out any passage that indicated threatening language, and if he couldn't, invite him to immediately apologize instead.

Oh, and because I walked away before hitting post-- what Polarbear said.


Some people really do have the problem that this author seems to think he's having.

Trust me, though-- too little in-class instruction and too few graded assignments creates other issues.

Indeed... 10 to 11 problems of simplifying polynomials, which takes him 40 minutes.

Yeah, I suppose 40 minutes, for an adult who hasn't used algebra in ages, and was an uninspired student in the first place, makes sense. But for the student who is actively doing it and understands the concepts, there's no reason for it to take more than 2 minutes per problem. That's a 22-minute homework assignment for the average student, and 11 minutes (or less) for the gifted one.

Agreed. The whole feigned offense and calling a parent into his office for a dressing down is laughable.

I thought about this idea.

The algebra definitely didn't seem excessive, but I can see that it could take 30 minutes for a learner to finish 11 or 12 detailed questions. It's easy to forget how much time a learner can need.

As for Angela's Ashes...well, I read the first 6 pages online. I loved it and may end up downloading it tonight. But it's not a quick read. Unlike the HomeworkDad, I have not slowed down in middle age. I can read 200 or more pages of a good novel (as opposed to an easy-read trashy one) on a weekend day when I'm not working. But it still took me 1-2 minutes per page to read Angela's Ashes--- and I lived in Ireland for many years and got everything he wrote on the first pass. His sentences are long and convoluted, use Irish-style punctuation, and their general tone is very Irish. Easy for me, not so much for people who haven't spent a lot of time in Ireland, I think. IMO, 79 pages by tomorrow for an American 8th grader is way too much. I would easily assume 1.5 hours just to read 79 pages at a quick pace, and maybe 2 for a bright high schooler. Well, an American could read it that quickly, but not understand it, if you see what I mean.

But more than that, books like this one should be savored, not consumed in a hurry so you can glom out three "powerful quotes" and "analyze" them. When you have to spend 1.5-2 hours on one assignment before rushing to the next one, appreciating the book as a work of art is almost impossible. This approach cheapens the book in a lot of ways.

I don't know about the earth science homework. The book was originally for college students, but apparently has a "high school binding."

DSS20 is a great example of how excessive homework (especially when combined with attention issues) can kill one's spark for education. He went from being in gifted pull outs in elementary, through still being identified in the gifted range in middle school, to barely graduating high school. It wasn't that he wasn't smart enough or did not want to do it, he simply was not able to concentrate on the homework load after coming home from school where he had to keep it together and concentrate for 8 hours. And I am not talking about some challenging private school or big city magnet. I am talking about regular 7/10 score suburban school district. Granted he had a lot of undiagnosed challenges but his friends had the same issues of too much to do for every single class. When you start seeing homework for the GYM class, it just makes you wonder ... And when I brought up his attention issues and other problems, rather than getting him tested I was told he was "lazy". I wish I had known back then what I know now and had him tested privately! But even for a non-LD kid, the workload was crazy! And the way weight was assigned to homework / in class assignments / tests made very little sense too. Homework in many cases was a matter of passing or failing the class. Thankfully DSS20 was great at test taking and barely made it through high school by getting As and Bs on mid-terms and finals.

Reminds me of a blog post by a high school teacher:

http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/homework-and-grades/
Homework and grades.
By educationrealist
February 6, 2012


I think math grades should depend nonlinearly on homework and test scores. Students who can show they can do a certain type of problem should be exempted from doing lots of homework problems of the same type.

This approach cheapens the book in a lot of ways.

Agreed.

Which is why-- based on what I know my DD's 8th grade literature course did-- I strongly suspect that Dad, there, was not being entirely forthright on the subject. I suspect that the student was being asked to "review" reading and pull out the quotes. On a second read-through, not so outrageous.

On the other hand, as I noted in my first post, I have some concerns with either of the books mentioned being used for students in this age/grade cohort in the first place, as they are VERY adult in theme and content, and really I doubt very much if they can be appreciated as works of literature by adolescents who are only picking up the narrative surface, and not the deeper aspects of both. Alexie's work is often deeply disturbing-- both of those novels are about what it means to grow up as a deeply disenfranchised and impoverished youngster who has an inner core of... something... that won't allow them to be pulled under no matter how strong the undertow. Both feature alcoholism and fairly unflinching portraits of family dysfunction. Both raise questions about reliable/unreliable narration, and whether or not there is intentionality present in unreliably narrated memoir as a genre. Like I said-- my concerns there are that neither book is probably very well suited to analysis by students of this age, because they lack the maturity for a nuanced look at either one that goes past the shocking, wry, and titillating content. Can they be read at a surface level? Of course. I just think that cheapens them.

Learning how to get into GT? Yikes! That says it all.

I admit I'm way too far away from the algebra assignment as a student and not there yet as a parent, so I couldn't judge that at all.

But wasn't it that, plus 79 pages of reading and the pull quotes, plus studying multiple irregular Spanish verbs, plus Earth science reading? (Might be remembering wrong.)

So we're saying if you can't do that in...what do we think is reasonable? I think an hour, hour and a half is reasonable for 8th grade, even pushing it--you're not college prep material?

15 minutes for math, 20 minutes to study Spanish, 60 minutes for 79 pages of reading and pull quotes, 20-30 minutes for the science...hmm. (Or do we think this should be less? How much less? How lightning-fast are these kids required to be?)

It's also important to keep in mind that, of course, the school day IS long and arduous in mutiple ways for most kids. I don't really mean intellectually. But my DD is sort of cooked when she gets home, which is why HW tends to drag on some days. That's why the HuffPo piece is so funny.

If that were the goal, they'd have to add "intrinsic motivation" and "dynamically synergize/synthesize information from disparate topics/sources" to the list, just for starters.

Of course, the point isn't to learn to be GT, just how to look like one to the untrained eye.

Dude, you forget that everyone is gifted.

I learned how to make a GT student in middle school. It was called health class.

You know, ultramarina has a good point. (Now that I'm done laughing at the series of posts which follow, that is. )

What are the kids doing during the school day?

I mean, none of the tasks assigned is UNreasonable, I think most of us can agree. None of what he listed is inherently 'busywork' of the nasty variety that any one of us could no doubt enumerate ad nauseum or at least until the cows come home.

But the real question is-- why is it HOME-work? What did this child do IN CLASS?

My daughter's school, for high school students, is quite frequently a 9-14 hours-a-day endeavor for students during their first weeks in the program. Eventually, for most of them, that settles into more like 7-8 hours.

But many students struggle with the workload of their first high school courses. The output demands are a lot higher, and they are expected to work quickly.

Here's my hypothesis, having spent some time around my DD (and her friends, who are all B&M students and a couple of homeschoolers); I think that this student is bringing home nightly homework which she maintains is "I have to do this tonight-- it's tonight's homework," whereas the intention in the assignment might be considerably different.

I think that the child in question here is deadline-driven, and that she probably KNOWS about things like that reading assignment and quote thing a lot of time prior to the deadline.

Ergo, I strongly suspect that the real problem for the dad here isn't that the homework is "too much" or that the difficulty, even, is all that much beyond his daughter. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. The fact that she's using "memorizing" as a coping thing would be a red flag for me personally, but I'm not him. Not judging.

What I suspect, however, is that in the move to the east, they moved from one school to another-- and that the scaffolding that preceded the current placement shifted under them.

Perhaps (speculating) at the OldSchool, this was the year that students would be shown how to manage time well in preparation for high school. Don't eat an elephant all in one bite, kids... use your planners, break things down!

Whereas at NewSchool, evidently kids are expected to be doing those things with a fair degree of fluency already. Now, one might debate endlessly about how developmentally appropriate such a thing is either way in a population 12-15yo, but at any rate, this IS now the expectation in high schools.

That might explain why she is rushing to do things the night before they are due, for example, and that some things seem to be in way larger chunks at once than I think is typical.

I view behavior like that as a warning sign, myself. It's a warning that my DD is putting things off and not managing her time well, or maybe that she's not PLANNING her time well.

Yes, but you can also remove the ones that you don't need.

I'm pretty sure that I never needed the following in middle school, high school, college, or law school

• Organization
• Study Skills
• Constructive Criticism
• Time and Stress Management
• Assertiveness

HA.

Constructive criticism

Who needs THAT? How unpleasant, to suggest that my work might not be-- quite-- perfection itself.

I don't know--the AA readings were very specific. 79 pages one night, 45 the next, etc. That didn't sounds like she had put it off. Sounded like nightly assignments--a few chapters, probably. It all sounded like that to me--11 math problems, a Spanish quiz, X pages of geo reading (hmmm...he did not specify how much this was---not much?), a 1-2 page writing assignment. It wasn't "And she has to do a 15-page paper TONIGHT on the Revolutionary War that no one told her about till yesterday!", which would also make go "Hmm."

Right-- but-- the reading also sounded to me VERY much like (and remember, I'm basing this off of reading schedules for quite similar literature and English coursework that my DD has done for the past four years or so) "finish this at home tonight" stuff, where probably at least some of that was started in class.

There's always a schedule for readings in novels. OR-- at higher levels, sometimes "checkpoints" in time. 30-45 pages nightly, that would strike me as quite believable, but on the heavy end of things. This is about the pace at which my DD was expected to read The Red Badge of Courage at that point in her academic career. (Talk about a slog...) And similarly Huck Finn, The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc. I think that the AP Lit pace, even, for The Importance of Being Earnest was something like four to seven days, and The Grapes of Wrath was more like two weeks. That syllabus gets vetted by CB, so yeah-- I'm skeptical that this doesn't entirely pass the sniff test.

It's pretty much always less than 45 pages, unless chapters are very much shorter/longer or if the language is quite difficult (as in Shakespeare), and then the intervals are specified differently. (So it might be that 79 pages was a sum of reading up to that point and beginning two days prior to that evening, or something.)

They are often expected to annotate as they go-- using post-it notes, etc. Generally reading time is partially built into the schedule and they're encouraged to read MORE than once (at least until you get to APUSH, which is legendary in this regard at reading levels of 100 pages an evening... but really, that class is considered CRUSHING beyond almost anything else IN high school).

I say all of this as someone whose kid DOES sort of work in this 'sipping from the firehose' manner-- schools really don't ask kids to do that. My DD constantly tweaks her schoolwork so that she CAN approach it this way. I'm well aware that such a thing doesn't suit kids at lower LOG, but that's precisely why I'm skeptical of the completeness of the narrative here.

Same way that one ought approach memoir as a genre, really.

Yeah. What killed maths for me as a child was having to endless pages of long division after I had learnt to do it. It also would have been useful if I had been taught more than the algorithm - it was years before I understood what the remainder was.

Or the inadequately trained one.