When I say 3-5 hours of homework a week, I’m talking about “projects like papers that need to be researched”, and reading novels/books/essays/the newspaper–the two main types of homework in my class–not worksheets and crossword puzzles. The only things that are not reading or writing are vocabulary (40 minutes a week, assuming 20 minutes to study for the quiz) and a syntactical analysis of a poem or quote–nedded because syntactical analysis is required to pass the AP exam and most of them have had vert little grammar instruction before me. This takes about 30 minutes, assuming 10 minutes to find a poem.
You can teach a subject on a high school level with very little homework, you can’t teach it on a college level-the point of an AP class–without the kids doing more work outside of class.
The teacher who assigns the most homework at my school is the calculus teacher. She’s got a 95% passing rate on the AP exam. You can’t get a 16 year old to display the same level of mathematical skill of a typical sophmore in college (BC Calc) if you don’t spend more time working at it. They’re three years ahead of “normal”. You may say it’s fucking ridiculous to push a kid to be three years ahead of normal, which is my fucking point about why kids don’t need to be in all honors classes.
Something else about your post hit me - bing bing bing - she’s an only child?
Only children are really susceptible to perfectionism. You may be dealing with a discouraged perfectionist who’s given up trying b/c the results are never good enough. There’s a lot of research out there on this - I’m just a first-born, and it’s been a problem for me. Only children often have it much worse.
Personally I like all of the solutions here. If it were my kid, I’d lower some of my expectations so that she can succeed, encourage her to push herself in areas of interest, make a couple of demands that really have to be met, and back off the rest. The bigger a “deal” this becomes, the harder it will be to work around.
As I said, possibly overprotective. I’ll cop to that. Thing is, she hasn’t ASKED to do anything. Occasionally she will ask to be dumped at the mall with her buds, or at the movies. I asked her why she didn’t go to the Winter Dance or the Turnabout dance, and she told me “all they play is that stupid hip-hop music.” The only people she has expressed any interest in hanging out with are the same friends she’s had since grade school. She’s gone to birthday parties at arcades and laser tag places recently. Last week, we all went into the city to see a vaudeville show performed by her two favorite Ren faire acts. In February, I took her and three of her friends to see Bowling For Soup in concert. When our little group gets together, it’s all the kids, too (we have, over the last few years, become sort of extended family - there’s five couple and a single dad, and a total of 8 kids ranging from 10 to 17) and as I said, they all tend to leave the grown-ups in the kitchen and they go off and watch movies or play pool. Since neither she nor any of her friends drive and we live in suburbia, there’s no “everyone’s going out, can I go too?”
In the summer, she spends most of her time with her buddies in the pool, or at the Renaissance faire - in fact, she asked one of the bands last year if she could work for them, they hired her to work 9 Sundays during the season, and we’re going to St. Louis for a weekend in May so she can have a trial run at it.
So anyway, if she doesn’t ASK to do things, I certainly can’t be withholding permission, and she hasn’t.
Sorry but thats not true for everyone. I maybe did 3-5 hours of homework my entire year of BC calc and got a 5 on the exam. I wasn’t the only one in my class that did that either.
She sounds perfectly normal to me! Basically, what QtM said. Teenagers are clinically insane. Just be supportive and hope she grows out of it. If she doesn’t, sell her to the gypsies and use the money to pay for a cruise!
I wouldn’t give her a pep talk, or let her wait until she fails to do it. I’d tell her right now that she’s lost the privledge of making up the work, that she lost it last night when she had the chance and blew it off. You’re right, she’s not going to do it no matter what, but if you tell her that she now can’t, not doing the work turns into a punishment she wants to avoid in the future.
After she get over the wailing and the knashing of teeth and the begging you to let her make it up–then give her the pep talk about the next grading period.
Honestly, the option to make up work puts a terrible burden on kids: on one hand, it encourages procrastination, because if you can do it tommorrow, why do it today? On the other hand, once the cycle starts, it leads to feeling overwhelmed because you soon have so much to do that it crushes you, and you don’t know where to start. So you keep procrastinating, hoping that your life is really a movie, at the last minute a miracle soundtrack will start, a photo montage will begin, and you will do an immense amount of work in a few minutes.
P.S.–With grade inflation like it is in schools today, B- to Cs are not good test grades. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that if she were doing her homework and had a better understanding of the material, those test grades would go up ten points. I mean, for one thing: trust me, if she isn’t doing the type of homework you turn in for a grade, she sure as hell isn’t doing whatever reading she is suppossed to be doing for her English class. How could her test grades possibly be as good as they could be there?
Your daughter could be me. I pulled in a mid-1400s in SAT scores without studying approx ten years ago but came close to failing out of highschool due to bad grades in certain classes and skipping gym for three years (classes that I liked, I did exceptionally well in). It was entirely b/c of not handing in homework + skipping school. Homework counts for a lot in highschool.
Nothing my parents did really helped-not threats, cajoling, fights, nothing. I got into a really good colleges based on my SAT scores + some extracurriculars I was winning multiple awards for and I ended up going to a fairly prestigious one. But I drifted through college in the same way-putting in minimal effort to get by. I wasn’t a hard worker.
And then I graduated. I got a full-time job for the first time. It fucking sucked. It was a great dot-com boom job but I was doing something I loathed and working with dumbasses who had power over me. And it was day-after-day-after-day-nothing like crap summer jobs. That was the point at which I learned that education is a boon. I haven’t treated grad school the same way I did undergrad and highschool.
So yes, I was a dumbass and when I look back I give myself small mental asskickings. My opinion is that you have to give your daughter a taste of what it’s like to be stuck in a dead-end job + wait for time to do its trick.
I honestly wouldn’t worry too much. The sleeping in you described is a normal attribute of the teenage brain - it’s melatonin levels are set back two hours in comparison to adult brains. They stay up later and sleep later because that’s where they are in their circadian (?) rhythm.
I went through this as well - managed to flunk a six weeks of Algebra and nearly flunked the entire semester. I also managed to hide it from my parents until it was too late to repair the damage from the first six weeks. I didn’t do it on purpose. I just, for some reason which I don’t understand now and didn’t understand then, would NOT do my work. It was some sort of protest, I think, though I had no idea what I was protesting against.
I got better, and while I never loved math in high school, I passed both semesters. Unless there’s some other really huge rhinoceros in the living room of your daughter’s life, this too shall pass. And she’ll end up shaking her head and wondering why she was so weird about the whole thing.
Like a lot of the posters here, I can relate to this problem. I would find anything more entertaining than what I was supposed to be doing. Even in an envronment with no distractions I’d be waggling my pencil (it looks like rubber!) rather than writing out another sentence of English homerwork.
Maybe you could sit with her for an evening and show her how to prioritize her work, how to break up large and daunting tasks into managable chunks, how to plan those frequent breaks as rewards for milestones rather than procrastination tactics. Don’t make it seem like a punishment, she’s going to need these skills for her life so learning them should be interesting.
If you succeed with her perhaps you could then help me. I’m posting on SD rather than doing what I should be doing.
I think you’re right. I also think a failing grade, at least in biology, is inevitable at this point. She may pull the English grade up, because she’s been actively working at that, and possibly the algebra, because the teacher has been giving her a bit more individual attention since the conference and, as I said, I could see the light go on in her head about that.
So I will grit my teeth and take your advice. Thanks.
But if you are a teacher, who do you aim the class at? The handful that will do fine no matter what, or the bulk that, left on their own, will flounder and sink?
Give the class problems to do but don’t collect them. If the people that need to do the homework don’t they will fail the tests and fail the class. I’d rather the person that knows the material pass the class than the one that doesn’t but did all of the homework.
The problem with that is that 16 year olds are not 18 year olds, and often need more of an incentive to do the work --although you can argue that if you’re going to be in BC calc, 16 years old or not, you’d better be able to judge your skill level and take steps.
English is a little different because there really isn’t a set level of English material that you either know or you don’t. And everyone can improve. A BC calc credit means you can do certain, widely established things. An English credit, on the other hand, more or less means you have done certin things, and can do them again, in a differnet form, if asked. For example, it means you’ve done a serious, substantial research paper. You aren’t going to get credit if you don’t do a research paper. It doesn’t matter whether or not you are pretty sure you could do a research paper, if you really wanted to. It means you actually have. It means you have constructed an arguement on either side of an issue, credibly establishing logical and emotional support for your claims. It doesn’t mean you could read and understand a selection of the major works of literature, it means you did. So no one passes my class if they haven’t acually done these things.
Can they pass without doing vacabulary assignments and current events? (the only things I do that look like traditional “homework”)? Sure. They will likely make a C–unless they are a very fine writer–but I set it up that way on purpose: in our system an AP C is weighted as heavily as an A in a regular class, and an A in an AP class is two letter grades higher than a 100 in a regular class. With that in mind, I think an A in an AP class should be reserved for those that really stretch themselves.
This was me from 7th to 10th grade. Over protected, smart, and under challanged at school. I didn’t do my homework because I didn’t want too. My parents screamed, grounded, took away priviliges, etc. Nothing worked. Until they finally just said “Fine, have it your way. Do whatever you want.” Then, when it was my choice when I did my homework and didn’t have a mother hen sitting over my shoulder watching my every move I got better. A lot better. When I was a senior I had six As and one B on my midterm report card. (My parents looked it and said “Well, pretty good, but here is some room for improvement.” But that’s a whole other rant right there.)
By this logic, though, my point still stands that an average, bright-but-not-a-genius kid in BC Calc–or any other AP course-- is going to need to study 3-5 hours a week—whether or not it is for a grade–and that if you think your kids shouldn’t be studying that much, and they aren’t geniuses, don’t push them into all honors classes. (Which is not what the OP is doing. This is turning into a bigger hijack than I meant it to be.)
Don’t sweat the hijack; it’s all in the name of education, right? 'Sides, when it all comes down to brass tacks, kids are KIDS, and if you give them an inch they’ll take a mile. A kid who knows the teacher isn’t collecting homework isn’t going to do the homework if he or she thinks they’re(*) bright enough to “get” it. And they ALL think they’re bright enough, because everyone knows teenagers have the corner on the know-it-all market. Certainly there are earnest nose-to-the-grindstone kids for whom grades are a Big Huge Thing, but I’d wager that the majority of teens will do exactly what they have to do to get by and not one iota more.
Anyhow, the deal here has always been, “if you do your best, and your best ends up being a C, fine.” It’s when she’s not obviously expending any effort AT ALL that makes me wanna reach out and whap her one.
(*I know. No gender-neutral pronoun. Forgive me, but it wasn’t worth the trouble here.)
I was pretty much the same way… never did an ounce of homework, UNTIL it got to the point where it was “do it or fail”. Then I’d do enough to get a good enough grade. I remember many times calculating exactly how much makeup work I’d have to do in order to get an acceptable grade. I always knew I could do better, but didn’t have the motivation for whatever reason. Heck, I almost didn’t graduate college because of missing lab work.
One thing I eventually figured out, was that I was always able to get homework/assignments done at school. I couldn’t get a damn thing done at home. I managed to do well by doing my homework in other classes (usually the ones immediately preceding the class where it was due) or during lunch. When I commuted to college, I’d go in early and spend time doing the work that was due.
Maybe consider having her stay after school to do her homework. I know my high school had late buses available, for people doing other after school activities. Or somewhere else other than home, maybe the public library or something.
I went through a similar stage at her age. My parents sent me to a shrink because apparently my slacking was a deeply rooted psychological issue (that sure made me feel stupid). Then, when I STILL didn’t improve, my dad randomly showed up and sat through my classes. That was nice and embarassing. It made me do my work just so he would leave me alone. It worked. I graduated high school with a 3.85.
I know some people might say sitting in is a bad idea, but it worked for me.
I spent the whole of last year doing this, this year as exams got closer I straightened up, and just in time too. I have to say, you don’t seem to offer her a lot of freedom, or even responsibility, if my mum was like that it’d just end in blazing, screaming rows, and then me ignoring her anyway.
You know, I’d kind of like to explore this whole idea that I might be overbearing, not giving her enough free time, or conversely not giving her enough responsibility. Would anyone care to elaborate on this a little? I’m perfectly willing to take my lumps if I’ve fucked up my job as a parent, and there’s always room for improvement, but maybe I’m too close to this to see what I’m doing wrong.
