Recommendations To Fight Overworking of High School Students

The number one obstacle to practicing that my high school piano students face is, by far, the excessive amounts of homework they receive. This is an epidemic that I know has been felt by all music teachers nationwide. I’d like to give three recommendations to parents (and students) to help balance out the life of the high school student.

My first recommendation is to speak with a local high school counselor to see how internships (sometimes called "externships") work in your school district, and make sure every one of your high school students knows about it. One of my students was able to get high school credit through her private piano lessons with me for two years through an internship. An internship is an activity outside school that counts for school credit and involves career exploration. Internships are gold on scholarship applications, often even better than extracurricular activities, since they tend to indicate passion and devotion beyond casual activity. Some school districts only offer internships to students who are part of the Gifted and Talented program. Students in my school district can still do the internship without being part of GT if they get a counselor recommendation.

Second, advise students to take summer classes as much as possible, leaving room for off-campuses or study halls their junior, senior and possibly sophomore years. Having just one single off-campus or study hall period is a double whammy against homework: not only is it one less class assigning homework, it is also an extra hour to get homework done. This instantly gives a student almost 2 extra hours each day to focus on what matters most to them.

For those who feel they might be a good match for Ivy League schools, keep in mind that Ivy League schools frown on satisfying core requirements such as English or history through summer school, because they like to see students getting the full year of in-class time in core subjects. Ivy League schools also frown on off-campus periods unless those periods are compensated by an extracurricular activity or internship (yet another reason to explore the internship). But even students competing for the Ivy Leagues can at least take classes such as health and computers in summer school.

Third, make those who lust for the glory and prestige of attending an Ivy League school aware that 1) these schools are harder than ever to get into (many times more difficult than one or two decades ago), and 2) League education isn’t what it used to be. It is one thing to be competitive in high school, but it’s another to be hypercompetitive, which is what students need be if they want to get into the Ivy Leagues. As Time magazine reported in a 2006 article, Princeton turned down four of every five valedictorians who applied in 2005, and Dartmouth could have filled its entire freshman 2006 class with students who got a perfect score on at least one part of the SAT with students to spare. This excessive, truly life-draining competition is something students should only consider if they’re sure the Ivy Leagues are really what they want, because the education comes at a tremendous price.

Is It Really Necessary to Push For The Ivy Leagues?

The following information provides additional support for the third point above about Ivy Leagues, which is perhaps the most important point of the three, and unfortunately, also the most difficult point to address with those who are deeply entrenched in their "anything less than Ivy League isn't good enough" mentality.

To quote the article, “Who Needs Harvard?”, which was the cover story of the August 21, 2006 issue of Time magazine:

“The Quarterly Journal of Economics published a study in 2002 showing that students who were accepted at top schools but for various reasons went to less selective ones were earning just as much 20 years later as their peers from more highly selective colleges. Much of the old-boy networking value has diminished in an increasingly performance-based economy: only seven CEOs from the current top 50 FORTUNE 500 companies were Ivy League undergraduates. In an economy in which people typically change jobs seven or eight times and new fields open up all the time, Loren Pope notes, ‘connections won't do a whole hell of a lot of good. It's your own specific gravity, not the name of the school, that matters.’ “

Loren Pope is perhaps our nation's greatest advocate for attending colleges based on the best match rather than best name.

Most importantly, take heart in the fact that college graduates can get into any good graduate program in the nation as long as they do well at a decent mid-tier school. Graduate programs don’t care about what students did in high school, they care about what students did in their undergraduate studies! So many high school students and parents are brainwashed into thinking their own local/state school has “cooties” and isn’t good enough for them or their child, when in fact their school could very well provide everything they need for a great education.

Problems That Create More Work Than Is Needed In High School

• Gateway Curriculum: In Washoe County, businesses and colleges have told the school district that too many graduating seniors aren’t prepared for college. This is the reasoning behind the introduction of “Gateway Curriculum” into Washoe County high schools. It does not change graduating requirements, but it makes it so that, by default, students must take a 4th year of math and a 3rd year of science, and also requires seniors to be enrolled in 6 credits their senior year. However, students can be granted exceptions on a case-by-case basis, and I would imagine one of the best reasons for such an exception would be private study of anything from music to karate. The curriculum is clearly designed as a response seniors who take off-campuses, slack off, don’t take math and go in to college “rusty” their freshman year. The curriculum is clearly designed for such students and is not intended to make hard-working students work harder than they actually want to.
  
  McQueen High School Counselor Carol Souders (who was a counselor when I attended McQueen from 1990-1994!) says this has increased the dropout rate since some kids have no desire to go to college, “...and they [those who pushed Gateway Curriculum] know it.”
  
  I taught two sections of Math 120 at UNR for one semester, and I observed several students who, in my opinion, never should have graduated from high school in the first place. One of them even had a Millenium scholarship. She severely lacked many fundamentals of mathematics that we should have been able to take for granted as already learned. One might initially conclude that I'm agreeing here with the need of Gateway Curriculum, but I'm not. I don't believe the problem lies in standards not being rigorous enough. I believe the primary problem lies in teachers who are giving their students passing grades when in fact those students really do not know the material. Too much of students' grade is based on homework, and not enough emphasis is placed on their test grades. Students copying homework assignments off of other students is (and always has been) an epidemic. The only reasonable solution to this problem is to make homework a maximum of 30% of the total grade. I also firmly believe that homework assignments should be checked off but not graded until they reach 100%. Students should continue to turn a homework assignment in over and over again until everything on the assignment is perfect - then a "100" is recorded in their gradebook (until then the grade is a zero). Homework assignments should be the student's opportunity to make mistakes without penalty. This creates a bit more work for the teacher, but much of this can be counteracted by having students grade each others' papers the first time (and have students switch papers in a random fashion each day). This system ensures that 1) the learning value of each homework assignment is maximized (everything is eventually corrected to perfection on every single assignment), 2) students' grades are not penalized for making mistakes on homework (that's what tests are for!!), and 3) more emphasis is placed on tests so that when a student receives a B in the class, it is because that is the TRUE representation of how well they learned the material.
  
  Click here to read the original legislative proposal for Gateway Curriculum.



• Wasteful Homework Assignments: too many teachers simply do not respect the excessive demands on their students’ time, and they assign homework and projects that extend beyond the scope of the class, justifying this with the perceived “coolness” of the assignment rather than on actual educational value. Examples that my own students have given me:
  • In an 11th grade physics class, one student had to build a catapult to launch a mini-pumpkin 25 meters. From this assignment, students in a woodworking class would learn more about woodworking than students in a physics class would learn about physics.
  • In an 11th grade AP English class, one student had to create a historical music video, writing new song lyrics for an old song, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”. The students had to dress up as Puritans. This would have been better for a video editing class.
  • In an 11th grade Spanish class, one student had to create a Spanish soap opera video in place of the final exam (one of 2 video assignments). Again, better for a video editing class.
  It’s not that I’m against this kind of creativity in assignments; if students really want to do this sort of thing, let them. But my students report the same thing that I felt when I was in high school: almost nobody in the class felt the instructional value of the assignments was worth the extra time of woodworking, video editing, etc.



• Group work: Washoe County School District requires a certain amount of group work / assignments / projects. In the workplace (in my opinion), this would be acceptable since employees are paid to do as the employer commands. But in school, teachers are actually the employees being paid by the students’ parents through tax dollars. The argument, “you’ll have to work in groups in the workplace” is invalid. School would only be analogous to the workplace if students were being paid by teachers (their “bosses”). In school, it is the other way around! “Group work” intertwines the grades of various students in a way that simply shouldn’t be: the smart kids do all the work and the lazy kids go along for the ride. Group work is punitive toward the hard-working kids in the class. Also, the sad reality is that group work is often assigned out of teaching laziness, since it’s easier to grade 7 or 8 group projects than 28 individual projects. I firmly believe that all group work in public schools should be absolutely banned. I have yet to encounter one single teacher who was able to present arguments that are even remotely convincing of the idea that group work is of significant pedagogical value beyond what could be done in the same amount of time with individual-based work.



• Writing Across the Curriculum: One student had to write a 4-page “math essay”. What is next? Proof Across the Curriculum? (“Assignment: prove that Shakespeare liked macaroni and cheese.”)

Two Of My Former Piano Students

One former student of mine went through the International Baccalaureate (IB) program at Wooster High School, designed to prepare students for study not only at U.S. universities but also at certain international universities. 24 of the 25 students in this class got 5 or less hours of sleep per day. The student’s half-joking solution (only half-joking) was to “...go back to preschool and have nap time.” This advanced and extremely talented piano student had to drop piano altogether her junior year because school - by itself - was already a total overload on her time, allowing almost no life outside of school. This was not just an average piano student - she was, in fact, the first of my students to reach the speed of quarter=200 (playing 16th notes) on her scales and same on her arpeggios (playing triplets). She dazzled people in recitals and music festivals. Her having to drop piano was nothing less than a tragedy.

Another advanced, talented student of mine opted out of the Reno Youth Music Festival in her senior year because she felt overloaded with the normal workload at Galena High School, especially AP Calculus, which included topics not typically seen until college level Calculus II. I have a degree in math, and I can verify that her high school calculus class was much more difficult than the same class taken at any college - in fact, it was a kind of difficulty that was entirely unnecessary for even the most devoted high school student to have to cope with. What is next? Will our Olympic athletes opt out of the Olympics because their high school gives them 25 hours of homework per day? It is no wonder why so many kids with promising athletic careers are turning to homeschooling, especially when homeschoolers so consistently outperform their public school counterparts! But I digress - that is another topic that I won’t get into here. There is something wrong with a school system that does not even allow a high school senior to participate in the most exciting piano event of the year - an event she had been working for that entire year (and her most important year, remember - her senior year!).

When I see student after student after student quitting piano, cutting back on piano, or opting out of the most exciting piano activity of the year, I find myself asking every time, “WHY??” What is all this for? 20 years from now, are all these students going to be looking back at their high school years thinking, 'I’m sure glad I gave up piano in order to raise my cumulative GPA from a 3.94 to a 3.99 - I’m sure it got me at least another $10,000 in scholarship money'?"

According to McQueen High School counselor Carol Souders (mentioned above), high school counselors go to conferences put on by ACT, SAT and college boards, and it’s all about “rigor, rigor, rigor” - students must set themselves apart in order to get into schools of their choice, and most of the things students do in school to “set themselves apart” do not set them apart. The good news is that music sets students apart! So why is music the first to go when trying to be “competitive” in getting into colleges? This simply doesn’t make sense.

Coping With School

My junior year of high school was the worst year of my life. I was so irritated when various people told me, “Enjoy these years while they last - they will be the best years of your life,” because these people had no idea how much school had changed in just two short decades, from the 1970s to the 1990s.

I was given anywhere from 6-12 hours of homework every day of school during my junior year at McQueen High School, and even though McQueen is known for its rigor (ranked #1 in northern Nevada in 2007-2008), almost every 11th grader I have taught verifies the same thing, no matter what high school they attend. Invariably, just when students are getting into advanced repertoire and they are finally practicing many hours each week with great efficiency on their own, high school robs them of the time they crave to do what matters to them most. The only way I was able to practice enough that year was to practice four hours on Saturday and four hours on Sunday. There was no time for practicing during weekdays! I had no life. How many students are willing to make that kind of sacrifice in order to keep piano going? Most do not. Instead, dedicated/advanced students give up piano - the one thing that will really make a difference for the duration of their entire lives - just so they can stay “sane” in high school and have a little bit of time to hang out with friends, watch TV or play video games.

Some of our nation’s high schools are responding to the epidemic of overworked high school students by requiring students to get parental permission before enrolling in Advanced Placement classes. Others are experimenting with later start times so students can get more sleep. High schools in other Boston suburbs — Wellesley, Lexington, Wayland — have organized stress committees and yoga classes. While I think the latter solution may actually make things worse (do students have time for an extra Yoga class when they’re already squeezed for time as it is?), I wish more school districts would acknowledge that high school students are severely overworked and explore solutions to this problem.

In my opinion, the best solution is simply to force teachers to reveal homework assignments at the beginning of the class period instead of at the end, giving students the option to either quietly do the homework assignment or quietly take notes on the teacher's lecture (or a little of both, since I know many people who are good at that kind of multitasking). There are some days when a 45-minute lecture simply isn't necessary, but teachers unfortunately feel that they must force all students in the class to listen to their lectures whether they actually need it or not. It doesn't seem to matter enough to teachers when half of the students in the class are going to get six or less hours of sleep that night due to having 6-8 hours of homework. Many teachers consider it insulting to them personally if a student uses their class time to do homework from another class, when in fact the student is simply trying to stay emotionally healthy in a system that all but forbids it. I even had one very honest teacher tell me, "It bothers me that you didn't need my help to pass this exam," after I passed a credit-by-exam for a computer class in college (the "I need to feel needed" ego indeed exists outside of K-12 too!). It apparently damaged the professor's ego to learn that some students do indeed have the capacity to learn independently.

Homeschooled students often spend 2-3 hours learning the same material that public schooled students spend six hours every day learning. What does that say about the efficiency of the current public school system? Public schooling should get some schooling of its own and take a few pointers from the advantages of the homeschooling system.