Addicted wrote:Snickiedoo wrote: It's a tedious vocabulary worksheet where you have to choose the correct definition of the bolded word. It seems very elementary to me; I know this stuff, in fact I knew it in fifth grade, so why am I being taught this stuff again in high school? It's no wonder Florida made it to the top 50 U.S. states in education.

I was thinking the same! My 10 year old gets this level of homework. Well, you'll have no excuse for getting any wrong then.
I got that level of homework when I was ten, but I was in a class exclusively for gifted kids at the time, so that was expected. This homework is coming from a high school Honours class. Being smart almost isn't worth it anymore.
I read an essay recently (in that very class, ironically; I didn't get to keep the paper, though, else I'd post it here) that schools in a sense are discouraging the more intelligent kids by placing them in classes with their less intelligent peers, so they have to sit through things they've known about long ago, and because they're smarter than the rest of the class, the teacher basically just hands them more busywork. I don't know about other people, but busywork is my major downfall: if there's no point to it that I can see other than to give us paperwork to do, I pretty much refuse to do it until I'm forced (which is why I'm really not doing well in that class grades-wise

). People don't like excessive busywork, which is exactly what we receive. In fact, the sheer fact that they do that is a serious demotivator for the 'gifted' students, and it promotes mediocrity no matter what the school says. Actions speak louder than words: the cliché has a LOT of truth to it.
If I can find the essay online or get a copy of it, I'll post it here.