Moms of high schoolers

[niccig]

How help DS cope with amount of English homework. He can do the work, he feels it’s too much. And he doesn’t like his English teacher, probably because of all the work, so that doesn’t help. She does give more work than his other teachers. Eg by Wednesday he has 3 exercises in textbook, 4 chapters in novel to read and annotate, vocabulary exercises. By Friday, he has vocabulary test, 4 more chapters in the novel and 10 online exercises.

He can do all of this without assistance but as he tells me, “He is just DONE!” he’s 9th grade, so he’s just going to get more work as progresses through the grades.


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[KpbS]

We’ve had similar experiences and for my DS what has helped is to schedule work in chunks. Give him specific deadlines to finish the vocab exercises, chapters, etc. Also if he can get ahead in the reading, that will feel less overwhelming too.

[JBaxter]

Honestly I have no clue how much homework my 10th grader has in any given subject. He has teachers who give more some give less He had 1 AP 4 honors & spanish 2 in 9th. Lots of homework It wont be the last time he gets a homework happy teacher.

[SnuggleBuggles]

That sounds like a lot. Luckily the school year is more than half done. At this point you just plow onwards and feel grateful you won’t have this teacher again.


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[dogmom]

As he progresses through the grades the work won’t decrease, it will increase, but it will be more projects which he has control over.

My DS went through a phase like this as a Freshman. He could have worked harder, but he was trying to figure it all out and adjusting. If he was done we just let him play video games while chatting with his friends. In his Sophomore year he decided to try harder and got about the and grades (A & B). He felt discouraged because he was trying harder but his grades didn’t go up, because the work got more challenging. As a Junior he’s “got this”. He decided to take honors English because he couldn’t do honors Chem. He’s a slow reader and not his best area, but he’s applied all his lessons from the past two years and managed his time well. I can see I huge improvement in his actual writing and it’s nothing to do with my involvement. I feel that he will do OK in college because he had to figure this out. Could he have gotten a few more A than B’s and had a higher GPA if we had been hands on, sure. But then I don’t think he would have been as prepared to function in his own.

The things we did for him were:

As him what projects were coming up and his plans were for time mansgfnt. We would just ask “Does that give you enough time? Should you start your work weekend earlier?” Sure sometime I knew it was just going to be a crunch. It was. He learned.

When I saw him taking notes badly (too much info not enough synthesis) I tried to help him. It did not go well. When he was “I don’t understand I studied but...”. I suggested he take his notes to his teacher and ask for advice. Let someone else tell him a better way.

We did tell him it was just sheer stupidity when he was losing easy points when not turning in basic homework. He tried different things. He finally settled on a wipe board near his computer.

Also, even if he was good at math there was a long of wishful thinking about grades. He was trending to a C in one class and I was, you know you can’t get anything better for a B for a final year end grade. He was thinking, it’s only November, I know I’ve been slacking but I can pull it up. I sat down and did the math on front of him. I was, sure, you can get a B+ or A- if you get A or A+ on EVERY assignment for the rest of the year. Is that doable? He’s was surprised. Since then he’s been much for consistent. Of note, that was a class that came back to bite him the following year when he couldn’t take honors math for 11th because he only did OK with a B in 9th. Good lesson.

We also praise him when we see him making the good decisions on his own. So it’s not just us going “why do you have a C on this assignment?” That and we stopped the online grade monitoring. It’s just not worth the weekly, grilling it would result in on my part. He appreciates the breathing room.

[niccig]

Thanks all!!! I do so hope this is a phase and DS will become more adjusted to high school work load. He can do the work, he just doesn’t want to do it. He complains about this teacher as some weeks she gives lots of work and not much time to do it. When he sits down to do it, he can do it easily, it’s just a lot so it takes awhile to do.

Complicating the whole “I dont want to do homework” issue, we have to keep DS’s stress levels down or he can have an increase in his pain disorder. I do usually work with him to break apart the work and keep eye on timelines. This teacher usually only posts the week’s work on Monday, but he could make sure other homework is finished over the weekend knowing he’ll get a lot of English on Mondays. He also needs to get started sooner once he gets home. I’ll try to get him to make these changes.

Part of me wants him to learn the hard way, it’s high school of course you have more work and you need to figure it out, but if too much work piles up, he’ll have an increase in pain and it sets him back to zero.




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[Kestrel]

Did you make sure that he has a quiet place to work with plenty of space? It could help with focus and getting the work done more efficiently.

I did notice that you said he had novel chapters to read, could he read those over the weekend, even though they are not officially assigned yet?

[AnnieW625]

Does his school offer after school tutoring or evening tutoring? That was a god send for me and I think went almost every Tuesday or Thursday it was offered my junior and senior year in high school for math and science. The group was run by the teachers from 7 to 9. While my grades ended up not being great and for math and still I had to go to summer school it still really helped me get the often one on one attention I wasn’t getting in class. I initially didn’t really care for my geometry teacher but this extra tutoring sessions really helped and I got to understand my teacher better.


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[jerseygirl07067]

Hang in there! My DD is in all advanced and 2 AP classes and she HATES anything related to language arts/english class. We had a lot of similar issues last year and she even made comments that she wasn't going to go to college after all of this. Fast foward a year later and she still hates engish class, and realizes that she always will because she is more of a math/science person. She loves math and finds writing to be very hard. I think she has matured more over the past year and has just learned to deal with it. Hopefully he will too. I would advise him to to try and just keep up with it, and try to do it first when he is more fresh, and then move on to other subjects. That does seem like a lot of hw. Do they have to work on any of it in class? I found last year that my DD my not, when they were given time, because she hated it do much. I had to stay on her, which she hated, but we made it through and I think she has just accepted this will be her least favorite class.