9th grade schedule - too much, too little, just about right?

[RoughCollie]

I sound like Goldilocks, don't I?

 

Here are the hours for classes I am estimating for my boys next year, when they will be in the 9th grade.

 

We are using Trisms for Ancient History & Literature, High School Biology in Your Home, Life of Fred Algebra I, A Beka Grammar & Composition, Writing Strands, Vocabulary for Achievement, Paso a Paso Spanish textbook and workbook along with Learnables Spanish. In addition, they will earn a year's credit in Computer skills by continuing to learn to type, learning word processing, and taking an online course on programming using Alice. P.E. will be karate lessons for one (1.5 hours a week) and 3 trips to the health club for various activities which will take about 45 minutes each.

 

We are using the entire Trisms curriculum, but I am only going to count it as 2 credits, one for history and one for literature. I might save up some partial credits so I can give the boys .5 credit in something after they complete the next Trisms after this one.

 

I figure I should schedule the following amounts of time each week for each class:

 

Algebra I = 7.5 hours = 1 credit

 

Grammar, vocabulary, writing, and literature = 10 hours = 1.25 credits

 

Biology with labs = 8 hours = 1.25 credits

 

Trisms not including literature (which is accounted for above) = 8 hours = 1 credit

 

PE = .5 credit (health will wait until next year & the boys will love this, so it won't count-count as far as they are concerned)

 

Computer = 5 hours = 1 credit

 

Spanish I = 8 hours = 1 credit

 

This comes out to 48.5 hours a week of study time. Is this realistic, or am I being too hard or too easy (horrors!) on them? The boys are required to earn 7 credit hours during the year, and I've assigned it for each course based on how our high school does it.

 

Also, both boys have slow mental processing speeds, especially with math and writing, so I've tried to take that into consideration. One has Asperger's Syndrome and one has Nonverbal Learning Disorder.

 

What think ye?

 

Thank you,

RC

[Linda in NM]

Go for it--I'm validated! We'll do the same Trisms (AOR), with a credit of English (literature, IEW, maybe some additional stuff, but not too much...Language Lessons for the Secondary Child, because I like the books)...We'll also continue with algebra (I, II with Videotext), German (with Learnables--I need to get out of the Rosetta Stone rut we're in), Latin Prep 1 (finish) and 2, and Abeka biology (with the DVDs, so I don't have to deal with the fetal pig's membrane...) I'm thinking 45 minute classes...maybe four days/week for the languages--I'll have to see how it goes...

[gardenschooler]

How many hours per year is required for a credit? I thought it was around 150 (I know we've had long discussions about the range - was it 120-160? Higher?)

 

Those times seem way long to me. Why do you need 8 hours a week for some things? Just curious, but it does seem awfully heavy to me (except the English/Lit - I can't get that down). We will spend only 45-60 minutes a day on some things, I hope.

 

I'd like to keep it down to 6 or 7 hours a day for 9th, plus maybe another hour of reading. I can't seem to do it, either. :confused: Something's going to get the ax.

[RoughCollie]

At the local high school, 144 hours of in-class time are required for a credit hour, 7 credits per year are required, and 15-21 hours of homework are given every week.

 

So I figured out this schedule with that in mind. I have no clue what I'm doing here. Will Trisms take 8 hours, not including literature -- how do I know? I just figured what the heck, toss it in there. If it turns out to take less time, it's a lot easier for the boys to swallow than me adding even more time to their schedules.

 

I put 4 of those weekly hours on the schedule for the weekend. If the kids get the weekend off, great. My reason for doing that was that they have to get used to not having weekends free from study time. I studied every weekend during high school and college, and I don't want my kids to get the idea that everything can be crammed into Monday-Friday, because someday that won't work.

 

So a few weekends off are okay, but after that, I'll juggle things around so they have to do some schoolwork during the weekend. Honestly, you'd think they spend their weekdays working in a coal mine, their weekends are so important to them. And this is not for a good reason either -- nothing special happens around here on the weekends except that they can sleep late.

 

If the kids start school at 7:30 a.m., with a half hour break for lunch, and a 55-minute lesson hour, they will be done at 5 p.m., except that the days they have P.E. will end at 6 p.m.

 

My DS who will go to the high school for 9th grade will start classes at 7:30 a.m., will be dismissed from school at 2 p.m., and will have 3 hours of homework to do when he gets home. So his day will look a lot like theirs.

 

Geez, there is no freedom in this schedule. Who wants to get up at the crack of dawn? Who wants to smell the roses after dinner? I want freedom in the middle of the day to do things without being stuck with a schedule. Trouble is, if we don't follow it strictly, it is real easy for me to get off track for a long time. I can lead us down rabbit trails that are fun and interesting, but have nothing at all to do with learning the required material for high school.

 

I hate feeling constricted like this, but I lived through it during my school years and the kids will too.

 

RC

[Jane in NC]

I do not intend to start the Credit Wars, but I will question you on your credit assignments.

 

My son did an AP Bio course this year (10th). (Note: I did not perform the audit with the College Board, but he used the scope and sequence of the AP Bio course.) The Campbell text alone is 1200+ pages; add in another 500+ pages for the study guide. Then there were computer exercises, labs, Investigations (another book). My initial thought in the planning stage was that this should be 2 credits on the basis of the amount of time that he would spend. But that is not the way it works. Schools (and most homeschoolers for that matter) only give 1 credit for this extremely demanding course.

 

You might want to ask our BTDT crowd about credit assignments.

 

Jane

[RoughCollie]

Jane, ordinarily I'd agree with you, but these are not ordinary times. :)

 

The credit hours I assign must equal that given by our high school for each course my boys take at home. The actual coursework we cover will exceed that covered by the school.

 

The reason I have 1.25 credit hours of English and Biology is because that is what is required by our school system. A class that meets 4 hours a week is a 1 credit hour course, and one that meets 5 hours a week is a 1.25 credit hour course, based on a 36 week school year. What they do is count .25 hours for the bio lab and .25 hours for extra writing instruction. This is all to prep for the standardized test, the MCAS, which public school students must pass in order to graduate.

 

The students are at the high school for 6.5 hours a day, which includes lunch and time between classes to move between rooms. The students are actually in class for 5.5 hours per day, because that is what is required by law in Mass. If I were in charge, they'd be doing actual schoolwork in the classroom for 7 hours a day to get 7 credits, not including homework.

 

When I ran the numbers, I was surprised by this -- and I think of this set-up as a sleight of hand. When I was in high school many, many years ago, we were in school for 1.5 hours longer every day than are students in Mass. We didn't spend a lot of time practicing to pass standardized tests every year either. We took them, but we did not prepare for them -- not even for the SAT.

 

The students here take 990 hours of school and receive 7 credit hours for it, which works out to 141 hours of class time for each credit hour. A 1.25 credit hour course meets for 4.9 hours a week.

 

I have to jump through hoops here for the school administration. I absolutely must have 7 credit hours of required courses and schedule 990 hours of schoolwork during the boys' freshman and sophomore years. Due to compulsory attendance laws, I will not have to get the school system's permission after the boys turn 16, but that is 2 years away.

 

So that's the story. BTW, the AP Biology course at our high school is 1.25 credits.

 

RC

[Jane in NC]

Got it. NC dictates little of what happens in a homeschool and does not micromanage the credit hour issue. I had not realized that homeschooled students in MA must take the pesky MCAS. Another kettle of fish (or is that bowl of chowder from the chowderheads given your location?)

 

Wishing you well.

Jane

[RoughCollie]

No, no. Homeschoolers, by law, may not take the MCAS. Sorry, I didn't make that clear until just now, when I edited my post.

 

Case law broadly governs homeschooling here. The cities and town each decide on their own criteria for homeschoolers, and as long as they do not run afoul of case law, they can do anything they want unless and until a homeschooler takes them to court.

 

I am very willing to take our town to court if they require anything that goes too far afield. I am not willing to go to bat over credit hours and required courses, however, because it's not worth the time and money to do so. Besides, I agree with their required courses because it happens to fall in line with what I have already decided to teach, except that they do not offer an ancient history course.

 

If the assistant school superintendent does not approve my homeschooling application this year, we will end up in court, you can count on it. We have a new AS coming on board on July 1, so I am trying to get the current one to approve my application. So far I have been successfully ignoring her requirements for years because I think they go beyond the scope of what I should have to provide. For instance, she requires a daily schedule, daily lesson plans, detailed scope & sequence for each course, a 100% complete list of books the kids will use, etc. My opinion on this is she can go pound sand. I give her course descriptions, credit hours and weekly class time, and a list of books we will be using, and that's it.

 

It's easy to homeschool in my town. Once I get the approval letter, I never hear from the school system again.

 

Got it. NC dictates little of what happens in a homeschool and does not micromanage the credit hour issue. I had not realized that homeschooled students in MA must take the pesky MCAS. Another kettle of fish (or is that bowl of chowder from the chowderheads given your location?)

 

Wishing you well.

Jane

[Nan in Mass]

I'm guessing of course. You always have to guess at this stage. I, too, calculate out hours like this at this time of the year because I can't figure out how to judge whether we are trying to do too many subjects or not otherwise. We stick to a schedule during the year because I'm way too fluffheaded and creative-minded to wing it. Besides, we all like knowing when the things will be done. We're happy, interested homeschoolers, generally, but we'd all rather be working on our own projects than the school ones.

 

We "do" school from 7 to 2, with a few short breaks here and there. Then we do our own stuff for a bit. Then we leave for gymnastics at 5. During the car ride, the youngest does homework. The oldest puts in a few more hours when we return at 9. Weekends, the oldest puts in at least 2 more hours each day, often more. Both children read for a few hours a day (how I get more literature into them) during the summer, and the older one, who is travelling part of the school year, does math and finishes up whatever else he needs to. This works out to about the same number of hours as you have scheduled. My advice is to read some literature during the summer if you get crunched for time. Be careful how you schedule work. My children don't learn if I chop up the time slots too small. We need to work in time slots of at least an hour. They also don't learn some things unless they see them twice a day. Hence the "homework" in the evenings. They concentrate very hard during "school" and need that long break at 2 to go outside or play world of warcraft (yup - my 13yo spends massive amounts of time on this, too) or whatever before they can do more school. It might not work to go from 8 to 5 all in a row. Another reason we like using a schedule is because which time of day seems to matter for some subjects. For example, some things I just don't do a good job of teaching after lunch. I put anything hard for me in the morning, and anything hard for the children about mid-morning. They begin with something they can do independently so I can get a few chores done first. Then I can really settle to work with them the rest of the morning. The older one wants to do something easy first while he wakes up. Stuff like that. You probably already know all this from homeschooling so far. It's taken me quite a while to figure out how to make scheduling into a tool that works for us LOL. They seem to be especially important for the one who is wired a bit differently. He doesn't need to be spending academic energy deciding how to fit everything in. Me, neither, for that matter. I wondered at first if it would impare his ability to schedule his work for outside classes, but it hasn't. He does fine doing that on his own for his CC classes, or for finishing a big project.

 

HTH

-Nan

[RoughCollie]

Thanks for your comments, Nan.

 

I let the boys choose how they want their schedules to be and as long as there are a few hours of overlap, whatever they decide works for me. This 7-5 schedule is my working prototype for the school superintendent.

 

The main thing is that one of them wants to start early and get done ASAP, while the other schedules his life around Red Sox games.

 

The time slots in my schedule are each 1 hour long, except for the extra 1/2 hour of math at the end of the day.

 

My kids all read a lot -- except that one only reads baseball nonfiction and DD (who is no longer homeschooled) won't willingly read anything published before 1990.

[Storm Bay]

Jane, ordinarily I'd agree with you, but these are not ordinary times. :)

 

The credit hours I assign must equal that given by our high school for each course my boys take at home. The actual coursework we cover will exceed that covered by the school.

 

The reason I have 1.25 credit hours of English and Biology is because that is what is required by our school system. A class that meets 4 hours a week is a 1 credit hour course, and one that meets 5 hours a week is a 1.25 credit hour course, based on a 36 week school year. What they do is count .25 hours for the bio lab and .25 hours for extra writing instruction. This is all to prep for the standardized test, the MCAS, which public school students must pass in order to graduate.

 

RC

 

Well, this is interesting. We're getting ready to embark on the high school venture but I've always based our learning on the MA case law where it states that there are other ways of learning besides classroom. Have you checked MHLA? We've been planning to issue our credits based on mastery, but now I'll have to go to MHLA to check out these interesting credit hours you mention.

 

While every school district is different (ours is fairly easy to work with, thankfully, and I don't have to submit logs of hours) some things are definitely delineated. For example, I never submit reports twice a year because case law specifically says once per year. This is the first year we haven't been asked for it in January, but it's a new person in charge and she may be more knowledgeable than the others were. Or else someone sent her MHLA's publication because she came from out of state. I haven't been on it for a few years, but MHLA has a yahoo group you may wish to join, too. Or are you already on it?

[Nan in Mass]

Here, as where I grew up, a year-long course is 5 credits. I always convert to 1 year = 1 credit when I post on the board, since that seems to be the way most of the rest of the world works, but my son's transcript will have a HUGE number of credits on it GRIN. I only count up hours-spent-per-day in the spring to figure out if I have planned too much work for us. Then I forget about it. Mine certainly are getting their 990 hours. I found that it wasn't very useful to figure out how many credits to assign based on the number of hours spent on the class because we always go way over. I've also always been very suspicious of those numbers because they didn't seem to make a distinction between hours of instruction and hours of homework. Carnegie hours doesn't seem to me to be very applicable out of a school situation. At least, I can't make it work for us, anyway. Luckily, our district has been easy to work with so far, also. The personel keep changing and nobody seems motivated to make large changes, which is nice. We just keep plugging along submitting paperwork once a year.

-Nan

[RoughCollie]

The credit hour situation may be only in my town, I don't know. This town has odd ways of doing things, IMO. Most important to me is that the kids get enough class time to earn the credit hours I award them, so that colleges won't question this in the future. I used our town's system to make sure that our plans for high school pass muster without a fuss. If the town's standards had deviated significantly from my ballpark figure of 150 hours of work per credit hour, I would not have done it this way.

 

My level of concern about this is higher now because the courses the kids take matter for college admissions. Also, I am pretty certain the town has never had any parent homeschool kids in high school. I am ready for more scrutiny, although based on past experience, this will not happen.

 

Yes, I've read the cases and I know the law. Every time we get a new assistant superintendent, I send them the superintendent's information (I think it is on the MHLA website). I ignore everything they ask for that I don't want to do. They don't ask for test results or portfolios -- nothing at all, once I get the approval letter.

 

I belong to all the Yahoo groups that are concerned with homeschooling in Mass, but I don't participate very often, or even read the posts much.

 

Well, this is interesting. We're getting ready to embark on the high school venture but I've always based our learning on the MA case law where it states that there are other ways of learning besides classroom. Have you checked MHLA? We've been planning to issue our credits based on mastery, but now I'll have to go to MHLA to check out these interesting credit hours you mention.

 

While every school district is different (ours is fairly easy to work with, thankfully, and I don't have to submit logs of hours) some things are definitely delineated. For example, I never submit reports twice a year because case law specifically says once per year. This is the first year we haven't been asked for it in January, but it's a new person in charge and she may be more knowledgeable than the others were. Or else someone sent her MHLA's publication because she came from out of state. I haven't been on it for a few years, but MHLA has a yahoo group you may wish to join, too. Or are you already on it?

[RoughCollie]

I have to sign a form every year that states my children are getting the hours of instruction required for public-schooled students. I sign it and forget about it.

 

High school is a lot different than grades 1-8 and I am much more concerned about properly documenting what the kids have accomplished both for college admissions and in case they ever have to attend our PS.

 

For instance, in 9th and 10th grades, the students are required to take 1.25 hours of science and math. If I give only 1 credit for those courses, they will be stuck with not enough credits if they must attend our PS in the future.

 

I am 99% certain that we are going to be the first family to homeschool high school in this town, and that the superintendent is more likely to get his knickers in a knot over this. There is nothing more important here than the public schools and virtually everyone thinks they are just wonderful, except for our family. I think that the only reason the PS folks tread carefully with me is that I am a lawyer, and they are intimidated by that.

 

Edited to add: The schools are good, but not great, here. I have one son who will be attending the PS for 9th grade, and I don't think he will get a substandard education. (He is hoping to get great grades so he can get a merit scholarship to a private school after 9th grade.) I think he will have to jump through a lot of useless hoops, though, and he may come back to homeschool any time he desires if it gets to be too much for him. That's the problem with having been homeschooled -- he can spot the wasted time, ridiculous demands, mushy grading policies, and incomprehensible scheduling faster than anyone, and it gets on his nerves.

 

Mine certainly are getting their 990 hours.

-Nan

[Storm Bay]

I have to sign a form every year that states my children are getting the hours of instruction required for public-schooled students. I sign it and forget about it.

 

High school is a lot different than grades 1-8 and I am much more concerned about properly documenting what the kids have accomplished both for college admissions and in case they ever have to attend our PS.

 

For instance, in 9th and 10th grades, the students are required to take 1.25 hours of science and math. If I give only 1 credit for those courses, they will be stuck with not enough credits if they must attend our PS in the future.

 

I am 99% certain that we are going to be the first family to homeschool high school in this town, and that the superintendent is more likely to get his knickers in a knot over this. There is nothing more important here than the public schools and virtually everyone thinks they are just wonderful, except for our family. I think that the only reason the PS folks tread carefully with me is that I am a lawyer, and they are intimidated by that.

 

Edited to add: The schools are good, but not great, here. I have one son who will be attending the PS for 9th grade, and I don't think he will get a substandard education. (He is hoping to get great grades so he can get a merit scholarship to a private school after 9th grade.) I think he will have to jump through a lot of useless hoops, though, and he may come back to homeschool any time he desires if it gets to be too much for him. That's the problem with having been homeschooled -- he can spot the wasted time, ridiculous demands, mushy grading policies, and incomprehensible scheduling faster than anyone, and it gets on his nerves.

 

Thanks for this and the other post. I'm even more glad we're giving my 13 yo an extra year before high school now. While our school district has been very easy to work with, I'm going to have to do some further research on credits. I do have to put the number of hours in our letter of intent, but I always put in those clauses that don't limit us to book/academic time. I'm not worried about high school as there is no doubt my dd will use all the book/academic time up easily as we're going to dig deep into her main subjects of interest.

 

All this comes up just when I was starting to get in the groove of "homeschooling high school really won't be so bad." But our school does NOT have a strong science program and dd wants to pursue science. Not too many people homeschool highschool here, but there is at least one family I know of doing this now. I do know of another family (one of their dd's taught my dd swimming, but she's in college now) who put their girls in school just at the end. I'm not sure why, though, and only heard this second hand, although from a reliable source as he swam on the same team as her.

[Brenda in MA]

I do have to put the number of hours in our letter of intent, but I always put in those clauses that don't limit us to book/academic time. I'm not worried about high school as there is no doubt my dd will use all the book/academic time up easily as we're going to dig deep into her main subjects of interest.

 

Karin,

 

This is the approach that we've used. We list the courses to be taken and the materials used. We state that we will cover a minimum of 990 hours. I've never been questioned by our school department over how I assign credits. I guess I am fortunate to live in a school district that doesn't ask for much. I hope it stays that way. I only say this because homeschooling high school in your town may be easier than you think.

 

Best wishes,

Brenda