• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

How was your homework load when you were at school?

I don't remember much, but as I got older the homework assignments just devolved into study this... read this chapter... or do these practice problems for the test. There wasn't much homework but with 3-4 assignments a day due two days after, and with an alternating AB schedule it did get tiresome.

I'm only 3 years into college but homework is rarely assigned outside of math classes.
 

Rad-

Member
I don't remember because I never did them. Not even in engineering school.

Plenty of reports though and in a way I guess they are homework too.
 
Had shit to do for most of it. Got me used to doing nothing for school, which led to some trouble later on though with some subjects.
 
Was top 10% at my highschool and basically spent at several hours a night studying Junior and senior year. I was also in band so most of my free time was taken up by that and homework. In fact I did homework several times so football games during my Junior year so I wouldn't get behind. In college I got a degree in Electrical Engineering and I basically had work to do from when I woke up around 9 to when I went to sleep around 10 for 5-6 of the days of the week unless I got lucky. I managed my time well and got projects done up to a week ahead of time so I became real good at knowing when I could take time off and when I couldn't.

A pretty large percentage of people in the program failed out in college so I consider myself lucky to have had a pretty rigirous high school because otherwise getting to college might have been like running into a brick wall.
 

SpecX

Member
Before high school I was on top of it. Homework done daily and only left science projects to the last minute. The load was pretty balanced. In high school I pretty much failed every class my freshmen year and was battling uphill every year afterwards to makeup for it. Load was intense, but I made it. Learned my lesson and stayed on top of shit in college, but the load was still pretty hefty with work/life/school balance.
 
In middle school, I'd usually finish homework before dismissal. In high school, however, oh boy. There were a ton. Probably spent around 6-8 hours every day, especially with the AP classes that I had.

I have less homework in college than I have in high school though, but I complain more about it now than I did back then. Can't wait to graduate so that there are no more!
 
Barely did homework in elementary, middle, or high school.

Last two years of undergrad was basically proving theorems for homework. Used the Feynman Technique on every concept that was lectured and aced all my upper-level math courses.

I had trouble with Spanish II for some reason even though I aced it. Learning a language as an adult is hard as fuck imo.

Graduate school was a different beast. Doing math in graduate school compared to undergrad is like night and day.

I was only given 3-4 problems as homework, but it took me all night and sometimes into the next day to figure it out.
 

old

Member
High school was 1-2 hours a night plus 1 hour of reading plus whatever long term projects or papers we needed to work on.

College didn't have much homework but did have 3-4 hours of reading plus papers and projects.

Grad school was 4-8 hours of homework, plus 3-4 hours of reading, plus papers and projects.

Grad school homework took so long because you had to create the solution to solve the problems yourself. You couldn't just point to a page or example in the text book to see how to solve it.
 
Elementary school, I remember that I went off to Japan for two weeks and did all the homework for those two weeks the weekend before I left. It was all pretty easy stuff.

High school, about four hours a night. It was usually okay, though I was perfectionist and I could get pretty worked up over math or physics problems. Weirdly at my school we were allowed to use answer keys sometimes, but you didn't get credit unless you could show step-by-step how you got the answer. It was pretty useful to know if you got the answer right before turning in the assignment, because then you could keep trying until you did it right, which made the homework a lot more useful.

College was pretty easy. I sometimes gave myself homework to practice stuff that was hard or that I knew would be difficult to do under a time limit.

Grad school... lol. I didn't even buy the books for most of my classes. I think I've averaged around four homework assignments per quarter. And only the quarters I've taken classes. The hardest grad school class I've been involved in is the last one I TA'd because I had to write the exams. And that's way harder than taking one. Then again, for my option, I only have to take six classes total.
 

captive

Joe Six-Pack: posting for the common man
I did it between classes 90% the time for middle/high school.

College was mostly BSing papers in a few hours or doing projects.

how long were your between class breaks? In middle school and highschool our "breaks" were like 5 minutes.


For me it was way too much, every damn teacher assigned homework like the only class we were taking was theirs, that applies to both highschool and college.

For someone that played sports for most of highschool, that meant getting to school 2 hours before it started so we could run anywhere between 3 and 6 miles. Then go to school then practice from school until 5 or 6 in the evening and then games all over the city. Then i had a job once i quite baseball, and then had a job in college. In college it was a lot of "Read this 100 to 200 pages by next class" which would be fine except that every class was assigning that much home work. It just sucked.
 
I always felt that my homework was fairly manageable. Every now and then we'd get the random "do these ten pages of problems" outta nowhere and my eyes would glaze over the work as I gave it 50% of my effort.

This is the main reason I liked to to as good as I could in school. It gave me "free passes" on homework. Not officially, of course, but if I didn't feel like doing an assigned thing I would just skip it since my grades were gonna be okay in the end.
 
Don't think I ever did homework except studying for big tests, sometimes I'd quickly do it before class started if I thought that the teacher was gonna check if we did anything.
 
When I was in high school I did about 3 hours a night. I was in advance classes so that might had something to do with it. I have two boys in high school and I doubt they did 3 hours of homework all year.
 
Rarely did homework in HS, I was a piece of work back then. Winged through most of it the class before it was due and aced most tests to make up for the difference. I'd say on a given week I did about 30 minutes of homework. During football season I'd be at school from 5:30AM to about 5PM at night, 5 days a week so teachers would always cut me slack.

Mostly a B/B- student.
 

v1lla21

Member
At least 2 hours of hw. Worst part was having to read boring ass books. Never did anything related to hw though. Was a mistake.
 
I didn't have much homework in most classes. There were a few that gave me a good amount but they were the exception. Regardless, I'm super lazy and I always did it all at the last minute.
 

kromeo

Member
I didn't do it most of the time, if the teachers were really getting pissed off I did it on the school bus on the way in..

I ended up with the grades I needed for uni, never really cared beyond that
 

Ogodei

Member
Public school it was always manageable, but we got study hall as far back as 4th grade (this was an anomaly: i had a 4th grade teacher who usually taught 6th grade in a K-6 school, so he was used to that setup). So i always had 30-45 minutes of pure homework time before i even left school. I had a few semesters in high school with no study hall, but i don't think i ever went a full year without it.

College i just used "socializing" as my dump stat and made sure i had plenty of times for homework and games :-/
 

Rigbones

Neo Member
I went to a pretty bad high school, didn't have much homework or AP/college-level courses offered to me.

Now I'm at one of the "top" US engineering schools and homework/projects/reports/labs/exams are ruthless. No time for games except for breaks or semesters when I'm interning.

I use "top" in quotation marks because I'm sure the experience is similar no matter the rank on those useless polls.
 
Some years were filled with more work than others, but on average I don't think it was more than 1-2 hours, including outside-the-class readings. When I was little my mom made me sit at the kitchen table and do everything in one shot, when I got older I started doing assignments during the long-ass commute in mornings and evenings and whenever at night.
 
manageable except for math where we had the option of handing in homework we missed at the end of the year which meant pages on pages of math in one night because you were a procrastinating fucker. But then again math was easy in school
 

blakep267

Member
Had a lot in elementary school

-Social studies/history worksheets or chapters to read
- Math problems and worksheets
- English/reading worksheet
- Science worksheet + charters to read

Math, science and history took the longest. History and science would basically require reading the whole chapter and answering questions at the end of the chapter. A chapter could be 20 pages

Math was just for example" answer questions 2,4,8,9,12,14 on page 28".

Took 1-2 hours for me. Mid to late 90's

Middle and high school was a bit easier since you didn't have the same classes everyday. Ex I'd have calculus or geometry on tuesdays and Thursday's and history only on Monday. So while there was more homework, I also had more time. There was more written papers also
 

Kieli

Member
When I was in high school I did about 3 hours a night. I was in advance classes so that might had something to do with it. I have two boys in high school and I doubt they did 3 hours of homework all year.

Lmao, that was me. Failed 3 classes and my parents were furious.
 

LProtag

Member
I'm an English teacher at a high school.

I don't assign too much homework, to be honest. Mostly reading. We usually work on essays in class, though I expect some writing gets done at home.

At the same time, I do need to prepare students to be able to work on things on their own time, as that's what college and the workforce are about.
 
I almost never did my homework and my grades showed that, luckily it didn't effect graduation or going through college!

But college really kicked my ass when it came to homework especially my last couple of semesters.
 

Kieli

Member
I almost never did my homework and my grades showed that, luckily it didn't effect graduation or going through college!

But college really kicked my ass when it came to homework especially my last couple of semesters.

Homework in high school was really nice. It started simple and eased you into the materials. You learned as you did.

University homework throws you into the deep end of the pool and asks you to swim when you can't even float.

Teacher in class for some random university course: "Ok, today, we'll talk about 1 + 1 = 2"

Homework for said course: "Apply Stoke's theorem to find the flux through a tetrahedron".

Wtf?
 

milanbaros

Member?
I completely disagree with homework for school children. The children in most need of support fall behind because their homes aren't environments to complete homework in.
 
High school I had a ton of HW. College mostly just reading. Honestly maybe it was lack of discipline , but HS was hard for me while college was very easy.
 

kromeo

Member
University was a struggle for me, there was very little guidance, it was basically just "go and write 2000 words about something", and in the third year go and write 10000 words about literally any period of history.. I found it really hard to motivate myself and did most of them the night before deadline
 

Jake.

Member
i usually didn't do it, although i went to a shitty high school.

university (if you call it 'homework' at this point) on the other hand...jesus.
 
I'm envious of all you people that went to schools where you could just not do your homework and still graduate.

I didn't do homework either, and I got straight Fs.
 

oneils

Member
I did it between classes 90% the time for middle/high school.

College was mostly BSing papers in a few hours or doing projects.

Did the exact same thing here. Went to hischool in mid 90s and university in he late 90s.

Edit: I skipped pretty much all of the study/reading in university. Was supposed to be reading a ton (30-50 hrs a week) but I skipped most of it.
 

Kthulhu

Member
Awful. I was basically doing it every night for most of the night. College has been even worse some semesters.
 

Raptomex

Member
It was enough for me to do it throughout the school day and I never failed a class. I wasn't a straight A student, mind you. That was during high school back in the early 2000's, though. I'm so glad that's all over. High school sucked.
 

gaiages

Banned
High school? I don't remember if it was a lot or not, but I do remember most of it being busy work. In 11th and 12th grade I had multiple study halls, so I just got all the work done then.

College it varies greatly on the class, but at least for the most part I feel like it's helping (also since I mainly take online courses homework helps to drive concepts in). I only went part time so the workload was about 1-2 hours reading during the week, and between 2-5 hours of assignments on a weekend day.
 

espher

Member
Canada, 90-2001 for elementary/junior high/high school.

I, uh, rarely if ever had homework outside of projects. We were generally given a bit of time to work on stuff in class and I powered through most of it. The only things I really ever did were review for social sciences + physical sciences.

University was a different ballgame altogether my first go around (I was in Comp Sci) and was a huge culture shock for me. I got absolutely mauled between the course load (5-6 courses + labs), work (20-25h part time -- weekdays only), and homework/project work. I had no social life to speak of.

When I went back in 2010 to finish my degree I had the good fortune of funding to alleviate my need to work (I was a displaced worker so I had a year of employment insurance + supplementary funding for the second year), which made it much easier. I needed to finish 3.5 years of my degree in 2 years, basically (so I took summer/intersession courses) but I could focus on school and work and I generally only had to spend an hour a night on it. I had switched to business admin and I had accounting and finance homework but the rest of it was mostly tests and end-of-term papers so I was able to distribute the workload well. I kind of regret not taking a more challenging courseload but I sure as hell could not have done 3.5 years of Stats or Comp Sci in two years... thanks, BBA!
 
Finished high school in 2004. It was pretty bad... but I was depressed and unmotivated so it's not like I ever did my homework. College, I was a History major, so the amount of readings were intense. Think 100 pages per class per week. That added up to a pretty sizable book every week between all of my classes.
 

Davey Cakes

Member
Probably about 1-2 hours each night on average. Reports and projects may have added an hour here and there.

I never really struggled with homework. Most of the time I was bored by it more than anything.

High school was nice because of "study" periods where I'd get at least an assignment or two done so I wouldn't have to take as much home.
 

cr0w

Old Member
Middle school sucked, because all I wanted to do when I got home was go out and play/hang out with my friends, but I still felt obligated to do my homework because I gave a shit.

High school was totally different. They still assigned a lot, but I did the bare minimum required to pass. At that point my mind had already checked out.
 
I had a ton, but I spent more time doing it in other classes then doing it at home. Some of my teachers would get frustrated with me doing it, but I just learned who and where I could do it. Then I would go home and play video games. College I stacked all my classes into two days, and usually had a hour or two break in between some classes, I would do it there
 
Never had any homework after the first few grades of elementary schools. Especially not in college. I find it baffling that you people have homework in college. We had projects and stuff, but never regular homework.

Pray tell, what is the functional difference between "projects" and "homework"
 
Top Bottom