How much homework for a child is too much? My grand daughter spends at least four hours on

[Lydia Leftcoast]

72. I was in a gifted and talented fifth grade class that assigned tons of homework

I was also kind of ADD--although they didn't call it that, so I was "fidgety"--so it was really stressful. In some ways I enjoyed the class and my fellow students, but that homework was a killer.

At the end of the year, my parents pulled me out of the program and put me in a regular sixth grade class. This teacher was much less of slavedriver but let us accelerate ourselves if we wanted to. For example, he noticed that there was a huge gap in arithmetic skills, a reverse bell curve with lots of students at each end of the scale, so he let those of us who were good at it work ahead in the book, as long as we stayed ahead of the rest of the class. Those of us who were ahead of the rest of the class in English were put to work producing a school newspaper.

I wonder if that kind of flexibility is possible anymore with NCLB.