Do Your Homework

Do Your Homework These lamentations are a ritual whenever we are gathered around kitchen islands talking about our kids’ schools. I don’t remember how much homework was assigned to me in eighth grade. I do know that I didn’t do very much of it and that what little I did, I did badly. She has told me she feels that the many hours of homework in middle school have prepared her well. “There is no way they can give me more homework,” she reasons. Parent-teacher conferences at the Lab School are similar to what I imagine speed dating to be like. Each conference is three minutes, and parents can attend an afternoon or evening session. The conferences are strictly first come, first served. At noon, my wife and I sit in chairs outside each classroom waiting our turn, sometimes for as long as 45 minutes. But at least one parent didn’t agree, and forwarded the whole exchange to the teacher in question. She explained that this sort of cross-disciplinary learningâ€"state capitals in a math classâ€"was now popular. She added that by now, Esmee should know all her state capitals. She went on to say that in class, when the students had been asked to name the capital of Texas, Esmee answered Texas City. Every parent I know in New York City comments on how much homework their children have. What I am interested in is what my daughter is doing during those nightly hours between 8 o’clock and midnight, when she finally gets to bed. During the school week, she averages three to four hours of homework a night and six and a half hours of sleep. To do this, firstly, you need to take your assignments and projects, including required readings, and break them down into manageable chunks. This site uses cookies to assist with navigation, analyse your use of our services, and provide content from third parties. By using our site, you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Privacy Policyand Terms of Use. Some turtles that start out small can grow to the size of a garbage can lid, so do your homework ahead of time when selecting a type and gender of turtle to call your own. Over 220,000 awesome students are learning how to dominate their classes, get more done, and land the jobs they want â€" and you should too. As Cal says, to avoid slumps, you should be doing some amount of work every day â€" even if it’s writing just one sentence for your English essay. My wife and I have noticed since she started there in February of last year that she has a lot of homework. We moved from Pacific Palisades, California, where Esmee also had a great deal of homework at Paul Revere Charter Middle School in Brentwood. I have found, at both schools, that whenever I bring up the homework issue with teachers or administrators, their response is that they are required by the state to cover a certain amount of material. There are standardized tests, and everyoneâ€"students, teachers, schoolsâ€"is being evaluated on those tests. I’m not interested in the debates over teaching to the test or No Child Left Behind. A student is supposed to be timing each conference, but the students often wander off, and the teachers ignore the parents’ knocking after three minutes. He disagreed, saying the teacher felt threatened. And he added that students weren’t allowed to cyberbully, so parents should be held to the same standard. Others were eager to approach school officials. In Southern California in the late ’70s, it was totally plausible that an eighth grader would have no homework at all. Some evenings, when we force her to go to bed, she will pretend to go to sleep and then get back up and continue to do homework for another hour. The following mornings are awful, my daughter teary-eyed and exhausted but still trudging to school. Esmee is in the eighth grade at the NYC Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies, a selective public school in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.