To expect my Yr 9 DD to do 2hrs homework a night.

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My year 9 daughter is at present only doing about 45 minutes a night homework (she refuses to do anymore). she is getting away doing so little at the moment. The school expects year 9 girls to do between 8-10 hours homework a week DD is spending less than half of that time on homework.

The school sent a letter out to parents asking 'how much time does your daughter spend on her homework' I sent the letter back saying less than 4 hours per week DD was sent to the year head for a dressing down. DD is no calling me every name under the sun (being very rude). She is saying all her friends spend the same amount of time on their homework and that being dressed down by the year head was unfair. The school expects pupils to achieve A /* or level8/9 grades for GCSE so she was told in no uncertain terms by the year head that 45 minutes a night on homework was unacceptable. This is in contrast to her elder year 10 sister who always does/did over 2 hours a night homework (both are at the same school) even her year 7 brother does 1 hour a night .

Am I correct to ban her from using her computer (except for school work) until she can prove she has spent two hours on her homework that night.

There's nothing worse than squandering talent and opportunities.

Agree with this totally. But if those opportunities and talent are recognised and developed between the ages of .. ooh ... about 4 and 64 ... then why is there so much angst about it? Unless you have a prodigy on your hands, then what happens in their lifetime and how they choose to live it should be something that a parent needs to reconcile with themselves, surely?

Yes, I believe in nurturing a natural talent, but I also think that there's too much pressure on children to BE something that most of them can't fulfil to their adoring parents' standard. For the most part, children will be the best they can at school and if that's a bit rubbish, then so be it. They may well turn into a bit of a surprise, so I would never judge a child by what they achieve, or not, at school. They are only as good as both the school and their parent(s) achieve, within those limitations. Children are both disinterested and information-sponges simultaneously, and the trick is catching them at the right time!

Threads like this make me feel sorry for the children being put under so much pressure to get A's all of the time.
I would rather my DC are well educated in life. I want them to be happy well rounded adults.

I don't feel the need to push my lack of A's on to them.

op it sounds like you didn't get the grades you may have deserved but trying to force your DC to achieve what you didn't isn't going to get the results for your dc.

I reckon my dd will struggle with the academic side of school but she is very creative, adventurous and positive. She works hard but as long she's happy with what she's doing and I encourage her and I'm supportive then she'll do well.

Have you asked your dd how she feels about school, study and grades? Its a lot of pressure for such a young person

hold

As a self confessed tiger mother though could you accept tiredness as a reason?

It must be utter hell to be the non competitive one in a high achieving family.

YABU. 2 hours a night is too much. There needs to be a balance of homework and relaxing. Yes it might be important to get good grades but not at the expense of a young persons wellbeing. She is at least doing homework. DD1 didn't do 2 hours a night. She got a first in her degree and is now at 28 the head of science department.

I think the is 2 hour requirement is misguided. I'm also academic and all for the idea of homework in older kids but I think it should serve two purposes, neither of which is necessarily achieved by setting a set time requirement.

The first point of homework, IMO, is to consolidate what's been taught in the classroom, thus improving exam results etc. Two hours of consolidation suggests that the class work hasn't been adequate or that there's over reliance on the after school work.

Secondly, and, more importantly, homework requiring planning, research and time management is useful for those kids who do well at school without needing to study so they can learn how to study autonomously before uni when the work does become harder and/or there's more volume. However, 2 hours of mundane "busy work" doesn't necessarily help with this, either. It may have the opposite effect of reducing motivation and enthusiasm.

If she's doing well and her output is well thought out, I'd leave her alone. There's no evidence as to why 2 hours means that she'll do brilliantly but she won't at 45 minutes. And 45 focused minutes, done consistently, in a student who's doing well sounds good to me.

I think it's excessive. In exam year my oldest was studying every night for 3 hours but she was exhausted. She took maths early and did the rest at the end of the school year in the summer. I think she slept for a week after.

She's in sixth form now, gets lots of free periods for studying, stays behind most nights to get extra help with A level maths so is out from 7.30am until 6pm three days. The other two she's home by 4.15 as she works from 5pm until 10pm. The other three evenings, she has two activities plus a volunteer job. She works at the weekend as well. She's 16.

She volunteers in a youth club, she's a volunteer lifeguard and volunteers with a charity working with disabled children. She has two awards for saving her friends life, has done her duke of Edinburgh award and is currently researching universities so she can become a paramedic.

She's well rounded and has interests out of school that teach her more than shoving her head in a book. She might not have ALL As and A*s but I'm so proud of her.

I did that much at her age. I don't think it is unreasonable for students who plan to attend a highly competitive university.

Eric - but did you need to? Or would a highly focused period of one hour been just as effective?

No, the smartest girls at the school spent that much time also. We were taught speed reading to help us get through it all.

We are looking at a "high achieving grammar" but the amount of homework they get is putting me off the school, as I want DD1 to be a well-rounded person who has lots of interests, not a workaholic.

Squandering a natural talent is exactly what I'm worried about. DD1 can write, sing, dance, draw, loves to do these things and is very good at them. I worry creative subjects will all be put to one side (as I felt I had to myself even at a comprehensive) in favour of being pushed for traditional academic success.

If your child passed the grammar test they shouldn't need two hours of extra work each night to get too grades.

The other thing about having an unhappily unbalanced and driven childhood is that it can be a hotbed for self harm, depression and so on.

There are obviously lots of different sorts of achievement and ways of measuring achievement. Lots of different talents, and dreams. Lots of different paths through life and ways of achieving your goals.

The OP is talking specifically about a high achieving grammar school, where the children have already been selected at the age of 10, and are from them on a path to a clutch of As and A*s at GCSE and usually University. The schools are geared up for those children and those outcomes- and I would be very wary of a grammar school that felt that, in order to achieve those outcomes, year 9s had to do the equivalent of another day's work outside school. I would question how effective the teaching and learning going on in the school was. A combination of pre selected able children and good teaching just does not need the addition of 2 hours homework a day to achieve the As (which, just the to repeat, is what grammar schools are aiming for. They are not the be all and end all of existence- but they are in grammar schools!)

One of the things I liked about my dd's grammar school is that they set as little homework as possible- the children were expected to have a wide range of outside interests, to play sport, play instruments and volunteer- the school did it's best to turn out well rounded individuals. And it achieved it (well, insofar as you can have a "well rounded" group of long haired blond clarinet playing Ugg wearing middle class girls mostly called Sophia and Emma )

But that's grammar schools. They are a particular and peculiar animal. And, OP, in this case, yours is getting it wrong.

It sounds like a typical grammar to me anyway. Competitive and pressurised when in fact the children are bright anyway and will achieve well anyway. The grammar should be pushing children having more balance.

I'm sorry I must be missing the whole point of this.
How can you specify that a piece of homework must take a certain period of time- is there no taking into account that the students are not actually identical

I have a 16 and a 17 year old.
DD would spend a longer amount of time on a piece of homework than the "prescribed" time because she is very much a perfectionist. She likes to take her time, plan, rewrite etc. ds1 will do the piece of homework in half the allocated time and if I tried to force a 2 hour rule on him then he would probably spend an hour staring into space.

DD achieved a good set of GCSE results last year, A*s, As and a B
Ds1 is predicted the same this year
2 different children.

I don't understand a blanket 2 hour rule regardless of who you are and how you study.

I also think if a school is insisting on 2 hours per night then it is lacking somewhat in teaching tbh.
At ds1 school, they are strongly encouraged into extra curricular activities, sports, music etc.
they are individual people. They are not there to simply make the school look better in terms of exam results.

In my opinion schools should be teaching students to manage their time, to become well rounded individuals with other interests, not exam machines

Hak err that's completely bizarre. What about those of us who never tried out for grammar in the first place? There's no grammar school near me."

Sorry? What's completely bizarre?

DC are at what you'd call comps.

DS is predicted mostly As for GCSE and I doubt he's done as much as 2 hours homework in the whole of the last year. .

DD is predicted As for GCSE and she probably does about 8 hrs/week h/work. If there were A * * grades, that's what she'd be on target for (mostly).

Some kids soar early & then plateau, others are fantastic late bloomers. Most get at least partly derailed by the rollercoaster of hormonal and social angst. Most kids benefit most from having diverse opportunities and challenges (not trying to be purely academic or vocational). We all can make valuable contributions to the world regardless of our academic qualifications. I don't have firsthand experience of grammar school system, but doesn't seem like it respects any of that.

Ragged, my experience of the grammar school system (via my DD1) backs up what you say.

It respected only academic achievement. Anything else was secondary, and university was the only option to have on leaving school. Nothing else existed.

My DD is at university now. A fairly rounded person, but I would say in spite of her school, not because of it.

She is enjoying uni, but not in a totally unqualified way. We aren't a wealthy family, so she gets maximum loans. She is now getting increasingly anxious about the debt she is accumulating, having hitherto been totally not ready to even consider it from that angle when in the sixth form. She is showing some signs of depression or anxiety, and has said, quite unprompted, that her school "did a number on us".

I know that amongst her current uni friends and her old school friends she isn't alone in feeling like that.

I am glad we didn't go down the grammar school route again with DD3. I see it as allowing her to continue her childhood for longer, rather than being robbed of it earlier than necessary.

That's my opinion based on my experience.

Two hours a night is seriously excessive. They are in school all day - they need the bulk of it to be taught there with homework as a consolidation excercise.

Would we like to take an extra two hours a night work home with us? No ta!

Children need downtime to let the day's information consolidate, to relax, to do whatever stuff they do as extracurricular activity or just to zone out.

There is absolutely no need for that much homework! I say this as an a ademic high achiever with three bloody degrees!

I think that if she is capable of getting A*s then she should be encouraged to do so. But the question of whether she needs to do that amount of homework is a separate issue. what are her grades like? Do they go up when she does more homework?

I got A*s and one A at GCSE and had a 'policy' of not doing homework unless it had to be handed in. I definitely did not do 2 hrs per night during ordinary term time. I got in trouble for it, but I also had a good idea of how hard I needed to work and what I needed to do.

IMO all that matters with exam success is keeping more or less on top of work during the course, then giving yourself a long revision period to learn it(ie working 8-12 hr days from the start of the Easter holidays) and also studying effectively (ie not sitting staring into space). Some written work needs to be done to practice analytic style but especially at GCSE it's mostly just memorisation. I'd say that working overly hard during the course is actually counterproductive because it really is quite important that you study hard in the revision period, and you're not going to be able to do that if you're coming out of a year where you've already been studying for 8-10 hrs a day.

However, I do think that you should continue to be honest with her teachers - if she is not performing because of underwork they need to know. Also I think that learning to brazen out breaking stupid rules is a good life skill!

I also don't agree with those saying that education doesn't matter with life success and that those children who are encouraged to get top grades are somehow being deprived. I got an Oxbridge first, and I think I've had a far, far easier time than most of my school friends in career terms. Yes of course academic success needn't stop anyone from achieving what they want - but it's much easier to go in with a great CV and have your pick of highly paid and interesting jobs than to work your way up from the bottom. Also there is a school of thought that says that academic pursuits can be fulfilling for their own sake.

Theycallmemellowjello I have an Oxbridge first and PhD and yes it opens doors and makes finding certain types of jobs a million times easier; in fact many employers specifically demand a degree or PhD from a "top 10 university" (and sometimes what they really mean is top 3/4/5). That said I was self motivated, loved learning and academics are definitely where my strengths lies (as opposed to others who have better interpersonal skills etc).

I also knew people who suffered massive burn out at university, or people who completely broke down emotionally when it became clear that however hard they worked they were no longer going to be the "clever one". There needs to be a balance and where the balance lies depends very much on the individual. It is absolutely not worth creating years and years of stress and animosity so you can be actuary instead of an accountant.

Unless they're starting any GCSEs early year 9 is the perfect time to step off a little, deal with puberty fallout, regain some energy and get mentally ready for the exam years.

The idea that making children do this level of work sets them up with a work ethic for life is a total myth. It happens time and again that the reality is that, as soon as they can escape from the treadmill, children do so, and they resent their parents for ruining their childhoods for so long. Or it can have even worse effects.

I remember a friend from university who had the epitome of the tiger mother: she was obsessive about work, to the extent that she would not stop even for a quick chat whilst boiling an egg - she'd put the saucepan on, go away and do some work and then come back again after four minutes. Yet her results were no better than those of us reprobates who could fritter hours away chatting rather than getting down to work. Once she'd graduated, she couldn't really cope without that structure in her life because she really had nothing else, and she sadly had something of a breakdown and essentially just dropped out.