Would I "be that parent" to say to school this homework is ridiculous.

[Pancakeflipper]

DS is Y11 in secondary.
Obviously GCSE years and homework from all departments really ramped up.
Every night after school there are revision classes and DS attends these. Gets home after 5pm.

On Friday DS was given homework from a subject teacher.

It is 28 pages long. One each page there are on average about 5 or 6 questions.
The homework is due in Tues. That gives 4 nights over the weekend to it.

DS also has 7 other lots of home work plus revision for end of half term tests.

To make it harder the teacher who has issued the 28 pages of homework or someone in the department has tried to make it into a PDF but the formatting has gone awry and questions/sections out of order.

DP has unPDF'd it and got it back an order that is more comprehensive and that has taken up this morning.

I'm fine about homework being given. But think this is just setting up students to do badly at it.

And how will.this teacher mark 32 different lots of homework of 28 pages?.

YANBU - can he just do a quarter of it? What will happen if he doesn’t complete it in terms of punishment?

How easy is it?

I taught maths. I could set 28 pages of very easy questions or basically impossible questions.

Maybe do half an hour or an hour and then stop?

Actually that's a good idea... They could do 1 hr and see how far they get. They have 4 past papers to do in other subjects - their entire weekend is homework.

It is instant detention for uncompleted homework.

It's not easy. It's detailed stuff. Some questions worth 12points.

The school should have a HW policy which sets out what is expected. It would be usual for a subject at GCSE to set one piece of HW per week with an expected time of 30mins - 1hr, depending on the policy.

I would check what the school policy says. It's reasonable if they have given him 4 days to do an hour's booklet. It's not reasonable if it is History (my subject) and is full of 12 mark and 16 mark questions which will take 20 - 30 mins each.

Seems abit crazy and mine goes to a strict school. Maybe he could approach the teacher on Monday? Though mine are on half term- so it wouldn't be as bad for them.

28 pages is a ridiculous length of homework, even if its easy questions. Definitely do one hour and tell ds stop. Email the head of year and outline how many hours of homework your ds did this weekend and across how many subjects and what are the school doing to stagger the homework and allow a reasonable amount of time to complete it all.

Write down exactly how long your dc spends on each and every piece of set homework over the next few days, including which subject the homework was for.

When I was at secondary school many moons ago there was one day a week when about four different teachers all gave us homework, and all due in the next day. Really bad planning on their part. Thursdays, I think it was. Presumably so we could hand it in the Friday and they'd have all weekend to mark it, but it did make it very difficult to get it all done in one evening.

Is the teacher going to mark it and give proper feedback? I would be tempted to insist that the teacher marks it in good time and complain to the school if it is not marked with personal feedback provided. Surely homework should be manageable for both student and teacher.

That's batshit. Oh the irony of the wellbeing talk we all spout these days. I'm sure a burntout Y11 will totally smash those GCSEs 😂I'd tell the teacher it isn't happening, send my kid out for the weekend and then sit the detention myself.

Contact the Head of Year. Tell your son to spend an hour on it and no more. I wouldn't set my Y11s anything that would take longer than 30-45 mins to complete.

Yes that’s crazy. Spend an hour on it, then set it aside. Ds could track down teacher at break time on Monday and explain the volume / deadline is too much.

Are you sure he is meant to do the whole thing? My Y11s have just been set a massive homework task but they are only supposed to do a quarter of it by next week and the rest of it is for future homeworks leading up to their mocks.

7 pages a day first thing in the morning. He then does revision. I used to get similar for geography, maths and history - you just need to divide it into chunks.

I agree with PP that your son should check if he's actually meant to do it all now. It might be a collection of one 'type' of question and the idea might be to work through the booklet both at home and in class as exam prep.

If you really aren't sure I second looking at the hw policy and ensuring your son puts in a good shift of the appropriate length of time and then you stop. Do that this weekend and then your son should confirm with the teacher as soon as he can on monday.

I think schools have gone a bit bonkers. This is why we're home schooling.

I'm a teacher. My year 11s have revision hw OR a page of practice questions every week. 28 pages is absurd.

I teach. No way is 140 questions a suitable homework for a week. Raise it with teacher/ head of year

I would check what the school policy says. It's reasonable if they have given him 4 days to do an hour's booklet. It's not reasonable if it is History (my subject) and is full of 12 mark and 16 mark questions which will take 20 - 30 mins each.

Conversely, 28 (especially badly laid out) pages could be less than a past paper in a science subject with, for example, a 12 mark question labelling a diagram with 12 labels that should only take a couple of minutes. 5 or 6 questions on a page that are mostly only worth 1 or 2 marks each and require 1 word/sentence answers or a simple calculation are very different from 5 or 6 long answer questions.

I often feel that teachers forget how many other subjects students have. The homework all adds up.

Yanbu.

An hour a week per subject isn't much at all.

Most students at our school are taking 12 GCSEs, so yes - an hour a week HW per subject is 12 hours a week, or a couple of hours every night (if you have Sunday off).

When you add in revision to this it is plenty. It's certainly more than I ever did (and I'm a teacher) back in my O level days in the early 80s.