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.
