I went to Ithaca High School in upstate New York which I think got this right, at least more right than a lot of other places. The freshman and sophomore classe

I went to Ithaca High School in upstate New York which I think got this right, at least more right than a lot of other places. The freshman and sophomore classes were like Carolyn describes in that they had lots of homework and I felt very overwhelmed. However as I got in to the higher level classes homework became optional. Most people don't believe this but I actually had an AP Calculus course with 100% optional homework, I didn't do a single assignment the whole year. The reason our teachers gave for this was that it was teaching us manage our learning, something that would become crucial next year in college. Of course, this puts a huge emphasis on the test since it's almost 100% of your grade, which is stressful too. But that felt a lot more fair to me. Our teacher gave us concepts that he was expecting us to have mastered by test time, great lectures on those concepts and homework containing problems which were similar to what we'd face on the test. The rest was up to us. In my opinion this system really works, I was already a strong math student coming in but this class solidified my love of it and I wound up majoring in Math. People have a certain cynicism about topics like this, because on some level it's a zero sum game. Everyone wants to be above average but that's clearly not possible. I don't think you can completely remove this stress, nor should we want to, it wouldn't be preparing you for life if we did. But we can substantially reduce it with different teaching methods and I fail to understand why these teaching methods are beyond considering for most high schools.