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

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.