10 Ways To Avoid A Homework Meltdown

10 Ways To Avoid A Homework Meltdown During the school week, she averages three to four hours of homework a night and six and a half hours of sleep. Before contacting a Nerd, I used to do 3â€"4 homeworks at a time and, needless to say, the quality wasn’t the best. One time, while trying to write a 500 word essay, I was struggling for 5 hours and finished it only by 2am â€" 6 hours before I had to submit it. Following this advice was the best decision for me as a student! Now I know where to get all the information from and never lose any data anymore. The Personal Nerd advised to do one work at a time to ensure that I fully focus on it, then do a short break, and proceed to the next one. This strategy helped me reduce stress of having everything to do, and the fear of not getting some homework done by the due date. If you’re also a multitasker, I’d highly recommend this strategy and avoid piling up information trying to do everything at once. My Personal Nerd said that every student faces this issue and it can actually be very frustrating (that’s for sure!). Each conference is three minutes, and parents can attend an afternoon or evening session. The conferences are strictly first come, first served. At noon, my wife and I sit in chairs outside each classroom waiting our turn, sometimes for as long as 45 minutes. A student is supposed to be timing each conference, but the students often wander off, and the teachers ignore the parents’ knocking after three minutes. There are standardized tests, and everyoneâ€"students, teachers, schoolsâ€"is being evaluated on those tests. I’m not interested in the debates over teaching to the test or No Child Left Behind. What I am interested in is what my daughter is doing during those nightly hours between 8 o’clock and midnight, when she finally gets to bed. I save my papers, drafts, books, lectures and presentations for each class in individual folders. Now that I take my deadlines seriously, I started taking organization seriously as well. Personal Nerd said that having a schedule is one of the simplest, yet the most effective ways to improve homework. I set reminders in my phone saying ‘write essay outline’ or ‘proofread the research paper’ and never forget about my tasks anymore. This advice was also very valuable because I reduced the stress because of the fear to forget about something and get issues with late submission. And he added that students weren’t allowed to cyberbully, so parents should be held to the same standard. Every parent I know in New York City comments on how much homework their children have. These lamentations are a ritual whenever we are gathered around kitchen islands talking about our kids’ schools. I don’t remember how much homework was assigned to me in eighth grade. I do know that I didn’t do very much of it and that what little I did, I did badly. To trick the brain and make the best out of your time, you need to â€" surprisingly â€" play along and alternate rest and work. One of my biggest problems when it comes to doing homework is procrastination and getting distracted. I constantly check my social media accounts, my favorite blogs, or just browse without getting anything done. At one point, I realized that all I do is just wasting time, so I wanted to change it somehow. In Southern California in the late ’70s, it was totally plausible that an eighth grader would have no homework at all. Reading and writing is what I do for a living, but in my middle age, I’ve slowed down. So a good day of reading for me, assuming I like the book and I’m not looking for quotable passages, is between 50 and 100 pages. Seventy-nine pages while scanning for usable materialâ€"for a magazine essay or for homeworkâ€"seems like at least two hours of reading. Some evenings, when we force her to go to bed, she will pretend to go to sleep and then get back up and continue to do homework for another hour. The following mornings are awful, my daughter teary-eyed and exhausted but still trudging to school. Esmee is in the eighth grade at the NYC Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies, a selective public school in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. My wife and I have noticed since she started there in February of last year that she has a lot of homework. We moved from Pacific Palisades, California, where Esmee also had a great deal of homework at Paul Revere Charter Middle School in Brentwood. I have found, at both schools, that whenever I bring up the homework issue with teachers or administrators, their response is that they are required by the state to cover a certain amount of material. It was a revelation to me when the Nerd told me that procrastination is normal and even useful. The reason is that we as humans cannot focus the attention on one subject for a long period of time. This is actually an evolutionary trait that we all have, according to Psychology Today.