I looked back over my last post and thought
"Oh my gosh, this year is going to crush my daughter!" That's too much work!
Then on a yahoo group the question came up about how many hours the kids homeschool or are required to homeschool by law... so we did the math:
In GA we are required to have an equivalent of 4.5 hours a day and 180 days. That is 810 hours.
For academics, my daughter is doing about 600 working hours @ approx 20 hours a week. She is working on 6 half credits and two whole credits, a total of 5 credits, so she is also meeting Carnigie requirements
(120 hours per credit hour) for assigning credits.
Her arts program takes about another 12 hours a week. At home practice and piano and voice lessons take about another 6 hours a week, so that would be 18 hours a week totaling just over 550 hours. That gives her 1150 hours.
It's a lot more than is required in my state, but not so much more than is required in other states. (1000 hours is a common number with 600 hours being in core subjects.)
Yes, this is a lot of work at about 38 hours a week, but she greatly enjoys the second half of it, and doesn't hate the academics either.
I also have to remind myself that public school high schoolers get 35 hours a week in school and another 10 hours of so homework and then they add on other extracurricular stuff.
I think I feel better.
Have you calculated how many hours your kids do school work each year? Inquiring minds want to know.
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2 comments:
I commented out of guilt. I did not even come close to that number of hours. Sorry about that.
I massaged my guilt by the reality that Ben used to work on homework for hours as a little kid in public school. The main reason was his dyslexia, though I didn't realize it at the time. It felt like child abuse to me, to go to school for 6 hours, and then work 4 hours (coming down off of ritalin). I decided I would make up for it in homeschooling. We did the least amount of work possible, trying to erase those early days and him thinking he was stupid.
I hope he is ready for college. He is slowly easing back into being a student, but now he has the gift of time and maturation, along with the gifts of the dyslexic (creative) mind to take with him to college.
I hope that explains my answer. I'm glad you figured out you aren't doing any more than any public school educators would. Hope you will forgive me...:/
I thought your last comment was very appropriate Brains...
We started off doing bare minimum too because they were still getting the work done. We've had more or less years according to their needs. For example, my son needed his senior year to mature in ways other than academic. He had all of 2 academic credits and 2 arts credits to complete so he could relax and work on becoming a more social being.
To me, that is still "going hard" but according to his needs.
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