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Comment by JamesBarney | Hacker News Reader

This seems to resonate with me. My little sister who is graduated highschool in 2014 had a very different experience than I did graduating in 2004.

I'd stay up late finishing homework in highschool but usually it'd be a rare occurrence caused by my own procrastination.

She'd routinely stay up past my parents because she just genuinely had 6-10 hrs of homework a night.

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Dude my elementary school daughter often stays up past one of her parents as she has genuinely had 6-10 hrs of homework many nights.

That is too much homework.

Our elementary schools have specifically dialed it back to at most 30-40 minutes of homework and that includes the 20 minutes of reading they want them to do.

I say this without it being critical of you but you really need to get your daughter into a different school or district. It's not healthy and research has shown it doesn't help.

I am not going to tell you how to educate your daughter. I can tell you that if my son was going through that, I would think that something was very wrong.

Same, I would certainly not enforce my child finishing all of that homework. I might go so far as to tell them not to. There's no way that wouldn't interfere with family time.

I'm very glad that my school district has a strict policy limiting homework, both in amount and in when it's due (i.e. not right after a holiday). This is generally considered one of the top three public high schools in one of the top three states. Maybe it's not a coincidence.

So your saying your sister had a 12-14 hour 'work' day on average and the parents didn't revolt in response?

in my opinion school is the place for schoolwork. extending into the home and personal time of students seems like training to accept a future employers hueristics of extending work hours for free by constantly ringing up employees after thier day at the job is supposed to be done. if its not possible to teach the subject in the alloted time,there is a problem with the educational system that needs redevelopment.

You'd be surprised how few parents care about mental health if a school is prestigious.

That's just a shit school with shit teachers. And we wonder why kids feel stressed when the adults in their lives are abusing them like this?

Not buying it. She may have taken 6 - 10 hours to get her homework done, but my wager is that she was spending 80% of her time on her phone or otherwise not working effectively.

My kids are in high school now and they do not have any more homework than I did. It feels like they have less, actually.

When I graduated in 2012, teachers were telling us that we should be getting an hour per night, per subject, of homework.

However, each teacher inevitably believes their class to be the most important and thus gives you more.

I can concur that I went to a top tier high school and I had 6 - 10 hours of high school. It wasn't because I was dicking around or a slow worker either. The pressure is high for kids these days and you should consider yourself lucky that your kids aren't in these schools.

I tried to transfer out of this school using the insane amount of homework as my reason and the Board of Ed. said the same thing - "There's no way you have that much homework." They refused to let me swap out to a less stressful school because it was such a highly regarded school. They were just so out of touch of how this school and other schools operated in this day and age that they couldn't admit that schools were so much different than 20-40 years ago in their own times.

I guarantee if I had you balance 50 chemical reaction equations, do 20 math problems in a homework set, have to read a few chapters from a book, amongst other assignments all in one night, it would take you the same amount of time to complete and you would burn out just as quickly as I and so many other kids in our nation are. Getting like 4-6 hours of sleep as a high schooler for the sake of prestige was horrible.

I probably had a handful of days per year in high school with that much homework, and it was always because I let it pile up until the night before it was due.

The sad thing is that nobody cares about your education once you finish it. I have never been asked for my high school transcript except for when I applied to university. And I have never been asked for my university transcript ever.

I would think it varies from school to school. At the school I attended, it was definitely more of the norm than it was only a handful of days, unfortunately. Having to deal with the massive amounts of work was sort of a weird sadistic hazing at that school. The teachers knew what they were doing, but did it anyway because it would "over prepare kids for college".

Anyway, I agree it is a sad thing. I wish schools and society would place more of an emphasis on mental health of children.

"I guarantee if I had you balance 50 chemical reaction equations, do 20 math problems in a homework set"

Which is stupid because the last 30 equations and last 10 math problems are probably just repeating the same things you learned from the other problems.

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