High School, College, Success!
Challenging how schools teach success
Teachers will tell you that finishing your homework is the most important thing you can do for your future success, but is it? With AP classes, it’s very common for students to have more homework than they can complete and still get a full night’s sleep.
Just how important is sleep?…
With our second child in her senior year and our third in high school it’s pretty much official. All of our kids are going to finish high school under staggering homework loads and there is nothing we can do about it. I have talked with administrators. I have talked with teachers. We have insisted our own children take on-level classes in some subjects (with mixed results.) And we have insisted on study halls (fewer classes). But my kids still have too much homework. So what can they learn from all that homework? (Because no, they do not reap enough benefits in college credit.)…
Included in this study about how technology and social media can hurt work productivity is a bit of information that explains how homework hurts children.
How many AP classes should you take? You want to get into a “good” college, right? So you look for advice on how many AP classes you should take. You find the same advice everywhere. Take as many AP classes as you can handle! But how many AP classes is that, really? Let’s take that advice and analyze what they’re saying. Let’s do the math! (And it’s not AP Calculus. It’s basic arithmetic.)…
High school parents, does this sound familiar to you?
Does your kid “do homework almost every day on Saturday and Sunday, working until late at night every day?”
Do your kids stay up late doing homework every (or almost every) school night? Do they spend several hours on homework on the weekends?
Do you have trouble going out of town on school holidays because your students are assigned homework over school breaks?
Well, the quote above isn’t exactly about homework. The quote is actually what some parent’s said about their daughter’s work situation.
[She would] “work almost every day on Saturday and Sunday, working until late at night every day…”
Going to school and doing homework are the “work” of our kids. (And some have outside jobs which is also work.)
Now, what if I also told you that the young woman the parents were talking about was a Japanese woman who died of congestive heart failure at age 31? A government investigation found her cause of death to be her “work life.”
This is not the first time I have read articles about death from over-work in Japan. In fact, death from work stress is so common that the Japanese have a name for it, “karoshi,” or “death from overwork.”
You might look at the title of the article, Young Worker Clocked 159 Hours of Overtime in a Month. Then She Died, and think it is so extreme that it doesn’t apply to you and your child. But I think they took the most extreme week this poor girl worked and used it for the headline. There were several quotes that felt chillingly familiar to me.
She rarely took weekends off.
My high school kids have homework every. Single. Weekend. Even though we have tried to moderate their schedules and they don’t have as many AP classes as their friends.
She worked until midnight nearly every night.
This was happening to our kids until we moderated their classes by parental restrictions on how many AP classes they could take. (Yes, we told our teenagers they couldn’t take every class they wanted to. We see it as our job to protect their health, even when it makes them unhappy with us.) Staying up until midnight or later still happens more than we would like it to.
… a country where exhaustion is often seen as a sign of diligence.
This was a quote about Japan. But it could just as well be a quote about the United States. Even more amazing and admired? If you can manage to hide your exhaustion.
[she was] “in a state of accumulated fatigue and chronic sleep deprivation” at the time of her death.
My kids have friends who fall asleep in class. So far, my kids haven’t done that. (Not that I’ve found out about!) But there are still too many school weeks where I know they are sleep deprived. I fear that the teenage love of Starbucks is fueled by more than the love for the taste of coffee.
Japan first recognized their problem with karoshi in the 80s. They are still struggling to do anything to correct it.
Think about it, when do kids learn their work ethic? How many times have you told them that doing their homework is important for that reason?
But we have lost sight of the fact that school is when kids also learn their sense of life-work balance.
Add up the number of hours your child is in school. (37.5) Add mandatory hours for their chosen extracurricular activity. Add homework. Are you past 40 work hours per week yet? How far past? Now remember that the 40 hour rule is a guideline for adults, not children.
Are our kids learning life-work balance? Judging from the skyrocketing cases of anxiety and depression on colleges campuses, the scale is about to tip.
How long until “karoshi” becomes the American word for “death from overwork?”
Young Worker Clocked 159 Hours of Overtime in a Month. Then She Died.
JILPT Research Eye: Industry-Specific Characteristic in Overwork by Young Regular Employees
A recent article in the New York Times highlights a school in the Boston area that has high levels of academic achievement. The school has lots of awards, high test scores, high rates of acceptance to Ivy League universities, and unfortunately the all too common occurrence of high rates of student anxiety. And a high student suicide rate. Another parent from our high school sent me this article and resonated with me for several reasons.
It passes the truth test of fitting with some of my own observations.
It shares many similarities with our own academically competitive high school, although not quite to the same extreme. (Or maybe that is hopeful denial.)
But I also have the added insight of having relatives whose children recently finished high school in the Greater Boston area (but a different school.) …
Are your sweet kids starting to act like teenagers?
Does this sound familiar to you?
One winter I suddenly realized that the kids in our house were moody and broody. Every little request was a huge imposition on their time and space.
“Could you clear the table after supper?”
“But I have so much HOMEWORK to do.” <whine>
Everything was “impossible.”
Everything else was a crisis. (Yes, I realized you can’t have more than “everything,” but we’re talking about teenagers here.)…
Finland’s education system ranks at the top of the world by almost every measure, in all sorts of rankings. How do they do it? How is the US education system compared to Finland? To get more information, I watched The Finland Phenomenon:Inside the World’s Most Surprising School System, from the Robert Compton Documentary series on Global Education, directed by Sean T. Faust. In my first post, I looked at the differences between Finland’s school system and our school system and then at how the Finnish educational system structured.
How else do Finnish schools differ?
In Finland, they actively try not to punish students for mistakes and there’s very little testing….
Finland is the highest ranked country in education by many measures. To further understand and compare U.S. education vs. Finland, I watched The Finland Phenomenon:Inside the World’s Most Surprising School System, from the Robert Compton Documentary series on Global Education, directed by Sean T. Faust. At first, I was thinking that I wasn’t really learning anything new or surprising. I’m not sure where I’d already heard most of the information. It may have been The Smartest Kids in the World or World Class Learners.
In any case, if you don’t have time to read two complete books, the documentary is a quick way to get a good overview of the Finland school system if you can get your hands on a copy. It isn’t readily available.
So why is the Finland school system so important? Several quick facts at the start of the film summarize it well….
The response at our school district’s showing of Most Likely to Succeed was overwhelmingly positive. The film did a good job of pointing out all the weaknesses of our current system, but left you with an uplifting feeling. This was a welcome change from all of the other research I’ve done that has confirmed my fears that something is drastically wrong with our current educational system, but with little to offer in the way of change other than patching over some real problems.
I think the positive response was also in part to a growing concern I have seen in our district about the amount of homework and anxiety in our kids. Parents did bring up some valid concerns, some of which were answered by other parents present who work for testing agencies, state education agencies, and universities. The concerns were mainly centered on project based learning.
As I said, the documentary gave the impression that project based learning was the only option. Even though it was acknowledged early on in the discussion in our district that it was just one option, the discussion stayed pretty much on project based learning. The long and the short of it is…