DHMS HW Notice if missed??
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Anonymous
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You can check Canvas to see if it’s turned in. If the assignment has been graded ParentVUE will show you it’s missing. The TA teacher tells everyone to update their planner each day to check, but they don’t necessarily go around and look over each other’s shoulder. And I have found in middle school there no grade penalty if it goes in a day or so late, although they will have a cutoff date right before the end of the quarter and will tell each child what’s still outstanding. DHMS is a very friendly place.
If you’re really concerned, get her an ADHD diagnosis and an IEP and she can be put in the Instructional Studies class, but the downside is that takes the place of an elective. I didn’t put my child in the IS program in 8th grade so they could take an elective instead. But if your kid is just a little confused, just check the iPad every day. |
Anonymous
The FAQ does not look updated. It has the old dismissal time of 2:24pm instead of the current 2:35pm. This past June, APS cut middle school homework back for 2022-23, from 20 min/night per course for regular homework to 11 minutes/night per course. |
Anonymous
What was rationale for decreasing assigned homework? |
Anonymous
Equity (not all students have a home situation that lends itself to doing homework) and decreasing student stress. |
Anonymous
So is it a temporary measure until they build systems to help support students at home (such as ext study groups or something), and reduced student stress should be less of an issue with the waning pandemic. |
Anonymous
There was no mention of it being temporary. The prior Homework Policy was from 2007 so updates are infrequent. While you make a good point about pandemic stress, they seem to be focused on stress that occurs in high-achieving, high-income districts, where students load up on coursework and activities. |
Anonymous
Did they lower the demands of homework in high school and do they expect there to be less homework in college? That was part of why it started in middle school was to ramp up expectations and build study skills delaying it will make things worse. |
Anonymous
They lowered homework for high school as well from 30min/night per course for regular homework to 15min/night per course. This does not apply to AP, IB, and DE courses, however. They did not address how this might affect students when they go to college. |
Anonymous
Why not make honors courses in middle school to prep students for AP IB etc? |
Anonymous
APS will offer new middle school honors courses in English, Social Studies, and Science next year. The content coverage will be the same as regular courses but students will do more involved papers and projects. The new honors courses are not designed to prep students for AP or IB courses per se, but should give them more chances to write and research which should help down the road. Math has its own set of middle school honors courses already which does cover additional content and ultimately prepares students for AP and IB. |
Anonymous
Part of why they are eliminating homework is because class size has increased everywhere. APE can be over the top, but you can size the huge jump in the number of classes over 27 students on their graphs https://static1.squarespace.com/static/60e8ac2567e7c27959b6ff45/t/61ee0efcbe6e285b237d7f37/1642991356737/Class+Size+research+v2+1-23-22.pdf With that many students, teachers don’t have time or energy to read and grade homework, and I’m sure those honors classes will be just as large which means the students may write more, it is unlikely to be critiqued and edited well enough by their over burdened teacher to develop their research and writing skills. Now if they have a test in or teacher rec only option, and cap the honors class size that can really help prep the students. |
Anonymous
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They lowered the HW requirements because studies have shown that homework doesn’t significantly improve student performance.
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Anonymous
So what I read was the APS goal was about 15/min per core course, so 45 min of homework? Are DHMS students getting 45 min of homework plus 30 minutes of reading?? For middle school recommendations are about 1.5 hrs of homework, but they may be modeling for just more courses. The issue with home work and performance came about when there was so much that kids lost sleep. Performance improves with enough homework that build their independent study skills, ability to focus, and repetition of skills such as math computation or grammar rules. There is no world where college will not have significant homework, because the sheer quantity of skills and knowledge that must be conveyed in 4 years. For non college bound students, homework may have little value in middle and high school, sure, hence why the importance of college and non college track courses even at that young age. You can look at private schools, whose real measure of performance is not test scores but college acceptance; they assign significant homework still. Maybe parents demand it, but if it was a negative for student performance they would educate the parents. https://www.greatschools.org/gk/articles/what-research-says-about-homework/ In fact, for elementary school-age children, there is no measureable academic advantage to homework. For middle-schoolers, there is a direct correlation between homework and achievement if assignments last between one to two hours per night. After two hours, however, achievement doesn’t improve. For high schoolers, two hours appears optimal. As with middle-schoolers, give teens more than two hours a night, and academic success flatlines. |
Anonymous
| Homework makes more sense when the classes are not block scheduled. With a block schedule the time in the class is so long that it makes more sense for them”practice” portion of the subject be done there so teachers can assist with questions. You can only sit there so long being talked at. |
Anonymous
If teachers can’t make use of block schedule for anything other than homework time, why have it? |