What are your rising juniors and seniors doing this summer?
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Anonymous
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My kids will be doing typical DCUM stuff...
Volunteering in various ways to help the poor, internship (on the hill!! OMG!!!), volunteering to build a house (singlehandly!!), prep classes and study for their 150th retake of the SAT, reading a minimum of 50 books geared toward next year's AP courses (of course, every class is going to be AP so they better get cracking), taking at least 6 college classes, going abroad for a bit on a service/mission trip and writing a minimum of 10 different college essays (you know, you can't use the same essay to apply to every Ivy). Summer productivity is a must, after all, childhood is competitive business, they better lean in if they are going to survive. |
Anonymous
| Good points. |
Anonymous
Wow, am I the only one who has sympathy for our stressed out kids? 1. DS's part time job is 30-40 hours a week, and he is saving about 80% of his earnings to help with college and so that he doesn't graduate from college penniless. 2. True enough, but mine will certainly spend time reviewing during what should be his first week of summer. It is so dumb that they have to take another exam in the same subject they already have shown competence in through the school course and the AP exam, but such is life today. 3. His choice not ours. And he already did the Princeton Review course last summer. It's actually six or seven hours a week in class for 5 weeks or so, another couple hours for commute time, and several more hours at home doing the assigned work. This year we will use a tutor to target his weakest area, and it will be up to him how much time to put in. 4. Well at our school they read three books of substantial length, often nonfiction (and I'm not talking about a casual read such as a Gladwell book). No way could they read them all in August. 5. Maybe my kid is a nerd, but he always does the assigned work over the summer. And he will definitely start on his essays because he works so hard during the school year, and has sports. To me that adds up to a pretty full week without the long hours spent at the pool or hanging out with friends that I enjoyed at that age. |
Anonymous
My DS would have loved those internships, especially the one with a judge. How did your DD get them? |
Anonymous
If you truly had sympathy you would remove your kid from the pressure cooker/meat grinder and let him hang out with friends and chill a little bit instead of filling up every minute with work and school. Instead, you humblebrag while signing him up for prep classes, tutors, exams and work. Its not "such as life", its the life you have chosen for him. |
Anonymous
I am sure you are a great and supportive parent. You want the best for your son, and he sounds like he is a self-motivated, hard-working, grounded young man. However (because there's always a however), I don't buy into the idea that kids who are from middle class or relatively affluent families, who attend private schools, who can get the benefit of SAT prep costing thousands of dollars, should be objects of sympathy. If kids are overscheduled and overstressed -- and they can be -- help them make choices to lower the stress, whether it's standing pat on the first SAT score, or taking fewer AP classes or AP exams, or making a choice of extra-curriculars. On the specific points: 1. A summer job is great. Makes for a great work ethic and, depending upon the job, can be a lot of fun. Reading between the lines -- it seems that you are hiring Prep Matters or another very pricey private SAT tutoring service -- you are not relying on your son's summer job money to make college affordable. He is working mainly for college spending money (although it sounds like maybe you're asking him to help contribute for tuition). That's not a stress situation. If the hours are too long with the academic stuff he wants to accomplish and you want him to accomplish, he does not have to work a 30-40 hours a week. That's a choice. 2. The SAT IIs have been around for years -- as "Achievement tests." I recall needing 2-3 to apply for college in the early 80s. This is not something new loaded onto the Millennials. 3. Tutoring for the SAT this summer is a choice, and you've got the money to fund that choice. I suspect your child has good scores at the least and is trying to max them out to be great scores. Plenty of kids in this country have no clue about preparation to start with, and if they do, they can't afford an expensive course or tutoring. 4. I don't think reading good books is hard work. Kids don't read enough to start with, which explains a lot of schools trying to make up for the deficit in summer reading. I also think you can read three books in a month (wait until college). 5. How much AP work really is there? At our school it is something like prepping for one lab in the science class and reading a book of modest length in the history/English classes. On the college essays, great, but that's a choice too -- how many schools the kid applies to, with how many supplements. Is he doing a club sport as well during the year? That's a choice too. If he's doing sports at the school, some sports take more or less time. There are choices there too. Your kid knows he gets to go to college, with you paying for it, and you paying for him to get a great education and max out his SAT scores, and with money in his pocket from his summer job. That's a good thing, not a bad thing. This doesn't mean kids don't get stressed -- but if they do, we as parents can dial down the rhetoric, expectations, schedule. Just because a kid wants to sing and act and play a varsity sport and apply to 20 schools doesn't mean he/she should try to shoulder that schedule. |
Anonymous
You nailed it! 
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Anonymous
| We never prepared for AP classes. That was what the school year was for. |
Anonymous
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At my big three we had to read books for English, usually three or four, and write several essays on each book. We often had history prep as well, reading one or two books and writing an essay. Essays were due first week of classes.
My cousins and friends at public school could not believe I was actually writing essays in the summer time.... |
Anonymous
My mcps kid had to write essays on summer reading and be prepared for tests the first week of school. Also had math packets that were graded. He had more summer work than my private school DC. |
Anonymous
| That summer work is sick. |
Anonymous
From my understanding, it comes out of research about how significantly kids forget/lose ground academically over the summer. Plus, for the AP courses, the expectations about what the teachers are supposed to cover in the school year are unrealistic given the allotted time, so I can see why they are trying to jump start things. (Not an AP fan, myself.) |
Anonymous
| So which Big 3 requires multiple essays to be written over the summer? We'd love to avoid that one! |
Anonymous
Yes, you are so right. Or, you have a kid like my step-son who got into a bad college with full loans, took 6 years to graduate (he was busy with friends), didn't get his first job till 23, (all while living with his girlfriend since 18 per the girlfriends parents as she could not live in a dorm) and now unmarried but a baby at 24 and going to graduate school on full loans with living expenses as girlfriend refuses to work (and now moving in with family so they don't have to pay rent). |
Anonymous
Wow... sounds like someone really sucks at parenting. |