Reply to I only want my child to get 30 min max HW per day

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m a high school teacher. Homework is educationally useless. Reading, studying and working on essays and projects is plenty.

Busywork is not education. [/quote]

Math and foreign language homework are not useless at all. Neither are science labs / lab reports as homework. Good luck getting a kid into a STEM field without doing homework.[/quote]

I have a PhD in STEM and very rarely had homework in high school.  I also never took AP classes.  
I did have a lot of work outside of class time at university but I also was only in class for 4-6 hours a day.  My kid is at high school from 8:30-4:45.  
I have 30 peer reviewed publications so excessive homework in high school is not required for a STEM career.  My co-workers probably have very similar stories.

For most STEM careers, where you go to high school and undergrad doesn't really matter.  Where you go to grad school and the skills that you focus on there are FAR more important.  One of my most successful employees went to community college before heading to a state school to finish off her BS and MS.  [/quote]

You do recognize the world is more competitive now than back in the Regan years?  My child just started at CMU for engineering. You absolutely will not be getting in CMU or any competitive engineering school these days without taking APs and DEs or an IB. Of course my kid didn’t find value in his AP stats class but he also knew he needed to at least be top 5% of his class to get into the schools he was targeting. Being top of your class means a high GPA which means A in all classes and as many weighted classes as can be handled.

Kids are much much smarter and way more advanced than we were it’s just a fact.  They have so much access to information at an early age when their brains are still developing. There a big difference between a 50yr old and an 18yr old and what they are expected to know and the drive they are supposed to have what was expected of you.

And no my son didn’t have busy work homework. You actually have to study to get an A in multivariable Calc at age 16. Probably a disciple you didn’t even touch until your junior year in college. [/quote]

Np. I went to Blair and did in fact take Multivariate in 11th grade. I went onto a good college and a career in stem. We did not get a ton of 'hw' in the late 90s - maybe 2 hrs. I specifically remember my calc teacher rarely assigning more than 4 problems a night (but she did assign it 5 days a week, and it was graded for correctness). But I had to spend time really understanding the concepts and that takes effort.  Our teachers were available everyday at lunch and after school for help which was very important. This is generally not happening with my own kids now who are in middle school - the teachers are usually teaching another class during my kids' lunch (they have to teach 5 at their school) and often don't stay after school. And my kids are also in several after school activities/sports so they aren't free much either.

So anyway I am not sure the issue is hw or not hw - it's that the classes that take real effort don't get the time they need. We had double period science at Blair and even some math classes. Yes, that means you can't take both AP Euro and AP Psych but is that really necessary as a STEM bound kid? Some of these expectations are meaningless.

Also - PP if your kid didn't find value in his Stats class that shows a lack of comprehension. It's the most accessible and useful applied math field. Tons of jobs in stats/data science. [/quote]

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