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[quote=Anonymous]For one week, sit with your child while they do the homework. Log the start and stop times for each assignment, along with when it was assigned and the due date. Then communicate with the teacher.

I am really careful about how much I assign. I have repeatedly told parents and kids to reach out to me if the homework load feels unreasonable. It’s rare but when someone does, I ask the child and parent to do the above together so we can figure out what’s happening. Almost without fail, I get a “never mind” after a few days. It’s one of the following:

1) Kid is “multi-tasking” with a device— playing a game, scrolling videos, texting, etc. “I’m doing homework” is the excuse they use to have a screen out. One tab is an assignment or something that looks like one, and in another tab (or another nearby device) they have something else going on. Or the TV is on.

2) Kid is screwing around all day with friends and would rather do the work at home where there’s no buddies AND it gets them sympathy from mom and dad about their mean teacher.

3) Kid is an extreme perfectionist who takes a ten-minute assignment and turns it into a two -hour assignment. I will absolutely work closely with these kids and parents if I know it’s an issue. Usually I end up doing a lot of clarification on requirements because the child will insist I’m asking for way more than I actually am. (And the child believes it.)

4) Kid is putting off every thing possible to the last minute, so there winds up being nights that everything piles up and there is legit 4 hours of work… for assignments they’ve had weeks to do and plenty of time in class for.

5) Kid is severely overscheduled with 3+ hours a day of activities. “My kid is up until 11 PM with homework” is actually “after my kid gets home from math competition class/five-day-a-week dance rehearsal/hockey practice/etc. it’s 9:00pm then they have to eat and they’re exhausted, so 20 minutes of homework takes 90.” Sometimes parents have never actually added up all of that extracurricular time and once they do, they either pull back on it, or just accept the hit to the kid’s school work.

6) Parent moved heaven and earth, got private testing, appealed and re-appealed and now their kid is in AAP, and the child is drowning because it turns out the first three committee decisions were correct and the child was just fine in Gen Ed. This one sucks for everyone involved.

There ARE teachers with insane homework loads, though. Absolutely! And if you’ve got one of those, keeping the log is going to he very eye-opening for everyone, possible including the teacher. 
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