I have a kid that must be an outlier where I feel he is not getting enough homework to prepare him for a college experience.
Just finishing his third trimester of freshman year with all As including his 4 honors courses put him with a class rank of 20 out of 800 students at a Minneapolis burbs public school.
He’s home by 3 and if he even has homework is done by 4. He claims all his teachers give them class time to do homework and he completes it there. Only homework I’ve ever seen him doing was HonPreCalc.
With him not seeming to feel much pressure in the homework department I’m kind of waiting for the shoe to drop where he gets hit with some classes requiring lots of outside class time and he struggles to deal with it.
But you are right, it isn’t the only way. I place high end developers - some I pay $100 an hour to (contract, so they are their own companies paying their own benefits). A number of these guys didn’t go to college. And there are other paths to financial stability - trades can be good - especially if you have the will to start your own business and leverage the labor of others - the very comfortable family across the street started as a hairdresser and a mechanic - they own a salon/spa.
And you are right that adults have no idea how long it takes to do something. We’ve had to work with our college student on helping them write papers - and it just takes forever. The patterns I see immediately, that keep me from having to outline through every sentence, they just aren’t practiced in seeing. The language that comes naturally to me, for them starts as a first draft of casual language to get thoughts onto paper and then a second draft where the language formalizes. The tricks I know to research quickly, they have had to learn. As a History major, they are looking at primary sources that are 200 year old handwritten script - for a kid who barely learned to write in cursive (why teach it?, everyone types) and has never had to read it - that just takes time and practice - what the Professor can read like I can read my mother’s handwriting, the students spend hours over. And really old people like me, we had to learn to do this all with typewriters, so your patterns of thought and language and habits of spelling and punctuation were firmed up in a much less forgiving environment. For me, being able to cut and paste and move sentences around is freeing…for them, its almost too much flexibility - like a toddler looking at too many choices. Three years in its better, they are learning…but it isn’t something you are just able to do.
And some of their college struggle has to do with lack of high school rigor - i.e. they managed to graduate from college prep courses with enough credits to enter college as a Sophomore - and had never written a rigorous research paper or knew what a peer reviewed article was. But that has less to do with the amount of homework…and more to do with the syllabus which was “teach to the AP exam, which includes being able to write an essay on the fly - not an eight to ten page research paper.”
(The kid is REALLY good at writing a five paragraph essay on the fly, because that was what high school trained them to do. And answer multiple choice questions.)
I recall that this issue of teacher coordination came up in an episode of “Big John, Little John” in 1976 - and for a wonder, an actual solution (having the teachers coordinate) was proposed and accepted. Obviously a fantasy television program.
Which high school (mine graduated from Tartan over in Oakdale)?
(And he can start at the UofM his Junior year and co-enroll…)
I was surpised when my pre-K3 kid got homework every day. What the heck was that about? I didn’t complain, I just did it with her (it was about 15 minutes of work), but I was surprised as heck. That stopped the next year though (only homework on weekends), and when she switched schools, she hasn’t even had homework yet as a first grade. When I was growing up (80s), there was no homework whatsoever for anything up to about second grade (it’s hard to remember exactly.)
In high school, we were warned about getting tons of homework, but I don’t recall ever having more than two hours max, but more typically about 1 hour, plus or minus a half. And this was a college prep high school with AP classes, and I got into a good university and all that. Three hours a day on average over the course of a school year sounds absolutely bonkers to me.
Champlin Park. Will most likely end up at a college in the UofM system so is looking at PSEO
That’s a lot harder in practice than it sounds. Like I said, the first problem is teachers don’t have much of a sense of how much work anything is. So everyone agrees to assign no more than X minutes and then keep doing what they’ve always done, but now they say it should take X minutes, even if it clearly doesn’t.
But the bigger problem is just that it’s hard enough to organize a class and get the pacing just right around pep rallies and field trips and assemblies and standardized testing and your own schedule (like if you have to be out for a doctor’s appointment). To then have a rule that you can only test on even numbered days or assign homework on Tuesday or whatever gets super challenging. If Unit 2 needs an extra day of review, but your “test day” is Wednesday, do you skip the needed review? If you don’t, does that mean you have to wait to test Unit 2 next Wednesday, and teach Unit 3 Thursday/Friday/Monday/Tuesday, only to then give them a test on Unit 2? And some people might assign a big problem set due in a week, and others small assignments every day. So if someone has one big assignment a week, does that mean everyone else avoids that day?
I’ve been on a lot of committees trying to do this. I’ve tried to find ways to make it work. It’s really, really difficult and leaves everyone feeling unsatisfied and less effective.
I graduated from Centennial - a long time ago. In general, Minnesota schools don’t have that sort of high homework college prep crush of other places in the country…there are exceptions. I think because we don’t have an Ivy League and onto working for Bain sort of mindset here - there are people who do, but for the most part, we aren’t parentally competitive in the same fashion, so it isn’t feeding those “mommy wars.” You can have a great life going to the University of Minnesota and getting an electrical engineering degree and a job at Medtronic.
Agreed.
My kids’ school had a no-homework policy. All learning and projects had to be done in class. It was great, it freed up after-school time for true extra-curricular activities. My kids were in sports, dance, theater, music, and other arts, etc.
But the parents revolted. After about four years, the school board was forced to hold a vote of the students’ parents. About 70% wanted the kids to have homework. So now the kids have multiple hours of homework every night. Extra-curriculars have been reduced to two per kid, and that is really stretching their time.
I’m not really happy about the situation, but home schooling is too expensive.
Funny, that’s where I work.
That’s great, but I bet far too many others used after school for television and video games, if not even worse activities.
If your idea is “hey, lets keep kids out of trouble by giving them homework,” that isn’t likely to work. Those kids don’t do the homework. They are either talented kids who pass coursework off test scores, or they aren’t taking college prep classes to start with.
And there is a hell of a lot of privilege in parents who want their kids to have a lot of homework. It means you have parents who are available to help and to coach, since few kids are really self motivated enough to sit down for three hours of homework every night. Those kids exist, but they are likely to be picking up something other than video games or weed to fill their time if they don’t have homework - maybe they sew historical costumes, or learn about the Civil War, or practice the guitar and get really good, or volunteer helping little kids learn to read, or read classic literature…too much homework closes those doors. Most kids who have that much homework require support…parents who are at least available to make sure they get fed, and are probably around to help figure some stuff out or at least be a sounding board for the frustration of learning something new. That’s hard if you are a single parent. Its hard if you have two parents in professional jobs that have their own 50 hour a week commitments (which is where we were - privilege around money - not necessarily the privilege of having Mom home when you got off the bus to hand you a snack and help you through Algebra.)
Now, theatre, dance, sports, etc. are also something that it takes a level of privilege to do - although often that is just living close enough to a bus line to get to the community center.
We all work at Medtronic, Target, 3M, United HealthCare or Best Buy. 
Honestly, to me, it seems that there must be something in the water or something. A lot of us seem to have our cranky moments this week.
I apparently came off as attacking someone who I was not trying to attack in any way.
My general strategy in school was to do my homework in class at any possible opportunity–any point where I wasn’t learning from the teacher. I also prioritized homework that was actually graded. That resulted in me having a lot less homework.
But, if I hadn’t, I think being in the AP classes would have meant way too much homework. (I did drop out of AP English entirely–though, in fairness, apparently we had been supposed to read four books over the summer, and I was not told this, so I had to read the cliffnotes really quickly the first day of class.)
I will say this: in my calculus class, I could have done with less homework and more explaining the concepts. I never had any idea why we using these derivative formulas. It’s integrals where practice starts to become more important, it seems to me, since it’s the first time where you have to be creative in how you solve things, and creativity requires practice. That’s why all the practice in geometry was so helpful—it was also a more creative side of math.
If I’d been taught what I’ve since found on YouTube about derivatives, I wouldn’t have forgotten everything but the power rule by the next year. I now know what dx and dy actually are.
Isn’t there a statistic that something like 40-60 percent of kids taking an all-AP HS course burn out because of the homework? I remember for a while there was an idea to take no more than 2 ap courses a year that way you spread the work out instead of taking all 6 at once if you were lucky to be able to take all 5 or 6 ap subjects
heh I was a slacker that gave the teachers fits especially in hs were in any course that wasn’t math and “technical English” … I was sick or had physical problems as a kid so all I did 80 percent of the time was read … and I had a college reading level at 10 so in a lot of school work like literature and history I was well versed So in those classes I just skipped the homework either by mutual agreement or not
Although there was one history teacher who decided I didn’t know as much as I thought I did and thought she was going to show me up when she assigned reports on ancient Rome … my report was on "top 10 reasons why ancient Romans had better sex lives than modern people "
and backed it up with 15 pages …she wryly said it was the best-written justification of smut shed ever seen … and decided id be a better student aide than student
It’s definitely not an argument I heard when I was a kid, in the 80s/90s. I mean, we kids moaned, but kids usually will. It wasn’t a general complaint. At primary school (age 4-11) there was no homework most days - maybe a reading book, occasionally a project to complete. Secondary school was maybe an hour a night.
Reports seem to be conflicting, but as a teacher and parent in the UK I know that kids were regularly being set three hours’ homework a night at age 11 at multiple different inner city schools I worked in.
The kids didn’t necessarily do it all, but they were being set it. The amounts were counter-productive, IMO, because most kids simply could not manage it, so gave up on all but the bits they actually liked.
2 AP classes maximum was the rule at my high school, I still think it’s stupid today.
Most people in this thread seem to be talking about high school. Well, my son is in 5th grade and let me tell you — he has gotten far more homework in elementary school than I did when I was a kid.