19 pieces of homework!

Flipping heck that seems a lot!
My two, one in y8 one in y9, have about 8ish a week, y8 dd has slightly less.

I've just added it up & at dds school (she is in year 9) she should be getting 13 pieces of homework a week. (Often she doesn't get it in practical subjects like drama or Food & Nutrition though. Each piece should take around 30 minutes.

At ds's school they get 16 pieces a week in year 9. Each piece should take around 30 minutes.

Hmm ... According to my unreliable arithmetic 19 pieces of homework a week is fewer than 3 pieces a day. It doesn't sound outrageous. Particularly since not all of the tasks will be equally taxing - and I imagine the lessons in school would have prepared the class for that essay?

What does he feel about it himself?

For comparison the yr 9 I know best spoke of 8 pieces of homework on a particular day recently. Though some of that can be completed during free periods within the school day.

Whether he and your DS are each making the best use of the time available to them and planning their week's work sensibly is a different matter.

Perhaps you might need to adjust your idea of "family life"? Supporting him in study is surely a huge part of that?

Anyway the Gulliver one is quite easy...countries going to war over the way they eat their boiled eggs the big enders and the small enders.(ie debate over the sacraments .that sort of thing. There's a great version of it illustrated by Chris Riddell

My son had a similar homework in Year 9 on Gullivers Travels. It is usually the case that they are going over a topic that has already been covered extensively in class rather than researching something for the first time. My son's experience was that they planned the content of the essay as a class and the teacher then expected them to write it up at home.

I think I did have to rewrite that one when he did it twice and it was gobbledygook.

Sometimes the homework appears harder than it is. Mostly it is consolidation of class work or bullet point research. To us it seems scary because we do not know what the classwork was.

The school should have a homework policy including a suggested number of hours. If what your DS has received is significantly beyond that, then I suggest that you let the school know.

He can't be doing 19 subjects so is he getting more than one piece a week for some subjects?

I think that must be typical to the school, not society generally - my dd has just gone into Yr9 (and I have two older dc) and none of them has been inundated with homework at this age not that's I'd be able to give you a precise count or level of detail.