How many hours per day does it take your high school student to complete their work?

[Luanne]

How many hours per day does it take your high school student to complete their work? Do you think it should be shorter? Do you think they should work on it longer? Does it increase or decrease as they go through high school?

 

Is this just for the main subjects (not including extracurricular activities)?

[Brindee]

There's a poll like this here: http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?t=124287&highlight=hours+day+highschool

[TravelingChris]

I have trouble answering the question because I don't know if you want us to divide the week total by five days? What about if we school year round and hardly take breaks? My dd does more than 8 hours x 180 days but I didn't answer your poll since I don't know how you want it done.

[AngieW in Texas]

I have a hard time judging how long it takes my 17yo to do her work. She takes a lot of breaks and doesn't like to do schoolwork in the mornings, so she often ends up finishing her schoolwork as late as 8pm.

 

My 14yo likes to get started and work until she's done. She does take breaks, but they are never more than 30 minutes. She starts at 9am and finishes around 5pm on Mondays, 4pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 3pm on Wednesdays, and 2pm on Fridays. These are approximate times. I only have a few things on her schedule that are split out by day. She likes to do the bulk of her work on the days that we don't have anything going on in the afternoon. We go to the library on Wednesdays and parkday on Fridays, so she stops earlier on those days. She takes a 30 minute break for lunch and 30 minute break to take care of a neighbor's dogs every day. She probably takes another 60 minutes worth of break spread throughout the rest of her school day on M/Tu/Th.

 

I'd say that altogether she spends about 25 hours each week getting her schoolwork done (not including her p.e.), so that's 5 hours/day. Since she has 5 non-p.e. credits, that works out just about perfectly.

 

We do keep working through the summer, but that is just to finish up any program that didn't get finished during the schoolyear (biology is going to take up most of the summer) and to keep going with math.

[Storm Bay]

I put more than 8 hours. This isn't because dd needs more than 8 hours, but because she frequently chooses to lollygag & procrastinate.

[Miss Marple]

I put more than 8 for my oldest (11th) because IMO he is never done. But that's because he is more in charge of his schedule than I am. Some days are shorter, some are longer. He also works so some days are very short requiring that the other free days are very long. He is taking concurrent college courses which necessitates that he follows someone else's syllabus (other than my schedule). There is *always* more school to be done, a paper to be tweaked before due, a musical selection to listen to, more practice on his Spanish, SAT/ACT practice, etc.

[Lori D.]

Hi Luanne! Because we don't fall into neatly structured days and seasons, I didn't know quite how to vote.

 

I *think* we would average out to about 6 hours a day.

 

We are not rigorously classical, nor do we have musical instrument or drama lessons/practices. The boys each earn 6 credits per school year, and are involved in several regular extracurricular activities. The bulk of our time is a concentrated learning time during the 5-day school week (M-F), with an average of 1 hour/week of solo reading at nighttime. BUT, the length of the school day varies with seasonal sports (PE hours) or educational programs; and our weekly/daily schedule varies due to the several educational activities and extracurriculars that pop up each month.

 

We try to be flexible home schoolers to incorporate unexpected opportunities -- or even use those opportunities to substitute for standard school day learning. (That certainly gets *harder* to do the further into high school we get!) Hope that is of some help. Warmest regards, Lori D.

Edited April 3, 2010 by Lori D.
clarification