Fighting School Stress

The main purpose of this site is to give support to kids who are in public schools through my own research, thoughts and experiences, and also through links to articles, books and websites that aim to do the same. I am especially targeting those who are overworked in high school, which I think is most public high school students. With exception to the few homeschooling resources offered immediately below, I decided to make "homeschooling support" outside the scope of this website since 1) it seems that support systems in the homeschooling community are alive and well, and 2) I decided not to homeschool my children ONLY because I felt three kids was too much for me to handle along with my full-time teaching schedule (consequently, I would have much to learn about homeschooling). However, there are still many things on this site that will be of benefit to homeschooled and public schooled kids alike.

Homeschooling Resources

Can't decide whether to homeschool or public school your child? The decision was difficult for me because of how many factors there were to think of all at once, so I spent several days compiling a gigantic pros and cons list. I feel this list is something many others out there would benefit greatly from but probably won't think to do themselves (or be willing to spend the time doing themselves).

Click here for "Homeschooling vs. Public Schooling: Pros and Cons"

Last updated: December 2011

Public Schooling Resources

Before going any further, please read what I have written about the work load of high school students. This is essentially what I presented when I was invited to speak to 900 piano teachers from around the world at the 2007 World Piano Pedagogy Conference.

Articles

• "Primary schoolchildren that sleep less than 9 hours do not perform as well academically, study suggests" (Sept. 13, 2011, Science Daily) - "...the lacking hours of sleep distorts children's performance in linguistic knowledge, grammar and spelling rules, and key aspects in the organisation and comprehension of texts, to name a few examples."
• "Snooze or Lose" (Oct. 8, 2007, by Po Bronson, New York Magazine) - "Overstimulated, overscheduled kids are getting at least an hour’s less sleep than they need, a deficiency that, new research reveals, has the power to set their cognitive abilities back years." [Do you still believe that saving $10 million per year on Washoe County buses is worth the sleep deprivation of thousands of Washoe County students?]
• "Who Needs Harvard?" (Aug. 13, 2006, By Nancy Gibbs & Nathan Thornburgh, Time Magazine) - This cover story offers insight into why prestige in college education isn't all it's cracked up to be and what priorities students ought to have in looking at colleges.
• "Advanced Yes, Placement No" (Feb. 20, 2006, by Scott Jaschik, InsideHigherEd.com) - This article strongly suggests that AP courses are hardly worth their cost despite the ironic motivation of "wanting to save college tuition money and time in college".
• "Studies Reveal Why Kids Get Bullied and Rejected" (Feb. 2, 2010, by Robin Nixon, LiveScience) - This article validates the idea that going to public school isn't always a healthy thing for development of kids: for some of them, by no fault of their own, it can be permanently damaging.
• "The Case Against Summer Vacation" (Jul. 22, 2010, David Von Drehle, Time Magazine) - "Deprived of healthy stimulation, millions of low-income kids lose a significant amount of what they learn during the school year. Call it “summer learning loss,” as the academics do, or “the summer slide,” but by any name summer vacation is among the most pernicious - if least acknowledged - causes of achievement gaps in America’s schools." and: "By ninth grade, summer learning loss could be blamed for roughly two-thirds of the achievement gap separating income groups."
• "Stop the Madness!" (by Jonathan Alter, Newsweek/Kaplan "Special Edition”, "How to Get into College 2008") - "Admisions talk dominates the senior year of high school, despite evidence that an elite degree guarantees nothing."
• “Less Homework, More Yoga, From a Principal Who Hates Stress” (Oct. 29, 2007, by Sara Rimer, New York Times) - A high school in Boston suburbs experiments with mandatory Yoga classes for seniors.
• "Is Your Teen Sleep Deprived?" (by Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center) - "As adolescents mature toward adulthood, nature seems to be preparing even their sleep cycles for the lifestyle change. Their bodies release the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin later in the evening than when the students were preteens, so they're not tired until later at night. Yet school bells still seem to ring at dawn."
• "Pa. teacher strikes nerve with 'lazy whiners' blog" (Feb. 16, 2011, by Patrick Walters, Associated Press) - A testament to the kind of learning environment any typical high schooler has to deal with.

Books

• The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Children and What Parents Can Do About It by Sara Bennett & Nancy Kalish
• Looking Beyond the Ivy League: Finding the College That's Right for You by Loren Pope
• Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students by Denise Pope. Note this is a different author from Loren Pope above. Denise Pope is also the founder of S.O.S. (website link below).
• The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids by Madeline Levine
• Motivated Minds: Raising Children to Love Learning by Deborah Stipek Ph.D. & Kathy Seal

Websites

• Stressed Out Students (S.O.S.) - "Helping to Improve Health, School Engagement, and Academic Integrity", this is a research and intervention project offered by the Stanford University School of Education, the California Endowment, the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health, and other Stanford University Departments.

Books (Public Schooling)

• Moral Questions in the Classroom: How to Get Kids to Think Deeply About Real Life and Their Schoolwork by Katherine G. Simon
• In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and S tandardization by Deborah Meier
• The Challenge to Care in Schools: An Alternative Approach to Education, Second Edition (Advances in Contemporary Educational Thought Series) by Nel Noddings
• Horace's Hope: What Works for the American High School by Theodore R. Sizer
• High Schools on a Human Scale: How Small Schools Can Transform American Educatio n by Thomas Toch
• Tuned In and Fired Up: How Teaching Can Inspire Real Learning in the Classroom by Sam M. Intrator

Books (Parenting)

• The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children by Wendy Mogel
• The Over-Scheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyper-Parenting Trap by Alvin Rosenfeld & Nicole Wise
• The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon (3rd edition) by David Elkind

Books (more on College/Vocational Choices)

• Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges by Loren Pope
• Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose: Vocation and the Ethics of Ambition by Brian J. Mahan & Robert Coles
• Luck Is No Accident: Making the Most of Happenstance in Your Life and Career by John D. Krumboltz and Al S. Levin
• Harvard Schmarvard: Getting Beyond the Ivy League to the College That is Best for You by Jay Mathews
• Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond by Marilee Jones & Kenneth R. Ginsburg
• College Unranked: Affirming Educational Values in College Admissions by Lloyd Thacker

Resources for Gifted Students

• Online G3: Guinevere's Gifted Group - "Offers accelerated and engaging online humanities classes for gifted students."
• Athena's Advanced Academy - "Offers fast-paced and exciting online humanities classes for gifted students."
• Davidson Young Scholars Program - "Provides free services designed to nurture and support profoundly gifted young people. Students and their parents receive free consulting services, an online community, annual get-togethers, ambassador program, and free guidebooks.
• TAGFAM (Families of the Talented & Gifted) - A public/self-identified gifted homeschooling support e-list

Please e-mail me with any other articles, books or websites that should be listed here. For articles that can't be found online, scanned attachments or typed e-mails would be much appreciated.

My Own Experience In High School

Sometimes students work too hard, and although I graduated in 1994 from McQueen High School with a cumulative 3.97 (ranked #11), I don't think I worked "too hard" in any of the classes. I considered myself efficient in that I did the bare minimum required to get an A or A- (unless I was feeling creative and wanted to do something strange, unusual or humorous with an otherwise mundane homework assignment, which happened occasionally). I got an honors diploma but didn't take any more honors classes than what was needed. I didn't take any AP classes that I knew I wouldn't use in college. Despite this practical approach of being a good (but by no means hypercompetitive) student, I still had two emotional breakdowns during my junior year of high school. I was severely overworked during that year of high school, and I was severely overprepared for college.

To put this in perspective, I took 22 credits my first semester at UNR because that's what I needed to do if I was to double major in piano performance and electrical engineering (thankfully I switched from E.E. to mathematics the very next semester, which didn't require nearly as many credits for a degree). 21 credits was the maximum number of credits that any student was allowed to take, and I had to get written approval from my E.E. and piano performance advisors to exceed that maximum. My E.E. advisor even told me that I would inevitably fail that semester because nobody can handle that much, and that I should think hard about which class I would drop when I realized it was too much to handle.

Well, as it turns out, I got a 3.66 that semester and still had plenty of time to hang out with friends, play video games, etc. I felt like I could have done much better. My laziness was due in part to still having some "senioritis" carrying over from high school. Don't get me wrong - my schedule was a very full one (Tuesdays went from 8am to 9pm, and I had three labs per week), but it still felt like nothing compared to what McQueen High School put me through during my junior year. 11th grade was ABSOLUTE INSANITY.

After becoming a parent, I started thinking more and more about my own kids and how much I would like to help them avoid going through the same thing, especially as more and more of my advanced piano students had to limit their practicing or quit altogether just because school pushed them too hard (see my "work load of high school students" link above). This is what had initially led me to the decision to homeschool my kids (I later changed my mind when I felt that while I could handle two kids, three was just too much). As Mark Twain put it, "Don't let school interfere with your education."

About Myself

I am a private piano instructor, classical pianist and composer. I have a website for my music profession at www.twedt.com.

This site is one of several of my online "contributions to humanity". A couple of other contributions of mine include the following [far less useful] sites:

• Matrix Resolutions - A website devoted to explaining the plotline of the Matrix movies.
• How to Toilet Train Your Cat - A website that will show you how to teach your cat to excrete in your toilet so you can stop hassling with litter.