Quantity of work

[EKS]

I am trying to figure out if I am asking my son to do an appropriate amount of work.

 

How much work would you expect of a 9th grader for English and history? I am interested in the quantity and frequency of both input (reading, lectures, DVDs, etc) and output (essays, end of chapter questions, tests, whatever).

 

And here's a really crazy question--how would your answer change if the student were in 11th grade?

 

Thanks!

[regentrude]

This is one of the YMMV questions.

 

I expect my DD13 to work on average ten hours a week on history+English combined, in order to receive one credit in each subject.

How often she works on it is her choice, we do not have a fixed schedule.

 

What she does greatly varies, depending on what material we are working on. Since the beginning of the school year two months ago she had a heavy reading load (the complete Iliad and Odyssey, Herodotus' histories, and a few other things)- so a lot of her English time has been spent reading. We also listened to 2x12 lectures from the Teaching Company. Because of this, she has written comparatively little, only four essays, and her history outlines. She will begin a longer writing project this week.

 

I do not give reading quizzes or tests. She will demonstrate her mastery through her writing assignments and through some longer-term projects of her choice (presentations, posters, maybe a contribution to National History day).

 

For 11th grade, I would not expect the time to increase - one hour a day for one credit, two hours for history+English combined if she is to earn one credit for each.

I would expect the complexity of her writing assignments to increase, the topics to be more difficult, the analysis more thorough.

[Ester Maria]

I count with 6 hours of Italian language and literature weekly, but the actual number of hours spent on it goes up a few hours since one cannot "squeeze in" all of the required readings - those 6 hours are mostly linguistic topics, some lit theory, as well as discussion with me about specific things when prepared, i.e. they needed to prepare their readings in advance. I suppose one may count with 8-9 "actual" hours of Italian weekly in our home.

(English is down to the actual 5-6, though, but they also don't have that much readings in English.)

 

I take a minimalist approach to History, though - 2-3 hours and that's it.

 

Output... They have weekly discussion sessions with me, to which they need to come prepared (material read, questions they'd like to ask, etc.). We rarely deal with History directly, though we discuss Literature a lot that way, and it takes a few hours each time.

I don't require a lot of writing - probably I should require more, but don't know where to fit that. I require a few papers a semester only for Literature, and for History some minimalist writing a few times semestrally as well. I know, I totally slack in that camp, but my reasoning is not to force writing too much before upper high school.

[Karenciavo]

I am trying to figure out if I am asking my son to do an appropriate amount of work.

 

How much work would you expect of a 9th grader for English and history? I am interested in the quantity and frequency of both input (reading, lectures, DVDs, etc) and output (essays, end of chapter questions, tests, whatever).

My 10th grade son spends about 1.75 hours a day on English and 1 hour on history. We use TOG for the latter so he's reading and writing for four days and we come together for discussion on day 5. His literature is from TOG and includes reading and analysis. His writing at this point is from The Argument Builder and he uses BJUP for grammar.

 

And here's a really crazy question--how would your answer change if the student were in 11th grade?

Writing, not necessarily more but perhaps. Overall the writing projects become more difficult.

[at the beach]

My child is in 8th grade but she's taking an online high school level Humanities course, so I feel qualified to answer.:001_smile: The class covers history, lit, and writing. She has two online classes per week at one hour and fifteen minutes each. Then, she spends approximately one hour per day reading and doing notebook work. She also spends additional time doing quizzes online at the end of the week as well as critical thinking questions. She has quarterly exams that take prep time. Finally, she has one essay due per month that is 850-1000 words MLA formatted. This includes all of her English and history right now. We do informally chat about her studies in this course. When taking everything into account, I would say it averages about two hours per day and that includes the time online. This might be bumped up some due to the papers, which she does spend extra time on. That equals two credits as far as I am concerned, possibly two and a half as the online school suggests that half credit go to composition for a total of 2.5 credits.

 

My answer would not change if my child was in 11th grade. Two hours daily for history and English are appropriate for high school level IMO and would result in one credit for each course. We are not interested in overload in these areas to the exclusion of others. Now, that said, my child does do her own reading on her time.

Edited October 27, 2010 by Violet

[KAR120C]

Generally I aim for an hour per subject, not including reading time. And generally I ask for a short paper every week or two for each subject in which I assign writing (literature, history, economics, science, and this year math), which comes to about five short papers every two weeks. Other than that I don't divide into how much time in lecture or video and how much in discussion and how much in work.

 

Reading is separate - he does an hour or two of reading every day, across subjects but mostly literature.

 

As the others said, it's not the quantity that goes up through the years as much as the difficulty.

[Michelle in AL]

I have 2 high schoolers. Both spend an hour per day on history and english. Sometimes that might go up to 2hrs extra per week.

 

College level courses taken in high school take 2hrs/day for each course at our house.

[Joan in GE]

In 9th grade - 1 hr/5 day wk English (most reading done outside class time) and 45 -60 min history 5dw...

 

In 11th grade, English is for AP Eng. Lang with PA homeschoolers and he is doing approx average (as he tends to do more the day a paper is due) so far of 11 hours/wk. We are only doing 1/4 credit of history in the spring as he is doing two full time sciences, two full time foreign languages, etc. Total hours of study/ week is approx 60 hours plus track and life skills...

 

FWIW:001_smile:,

Joan

[Mejane]

My 9th grader spends about four hours per week doing the analyzing, discussing and writing for his online English class. He's not a quick reader, so he does the reading either at night or on the weekends, which takes an extra hour on average. Weekly, he does several journal entries including short paragraphs and an essay for the writing portion.

 

History is about the same, although the reading is more intense due to notetaking. There is also has a research paper scheduled for mid-term.

[Excelsior! Academy]

Would you like an unqualified answer? My dd is in 8th, but will be doing MFW in 9th next year. From what I hear it is 3 hours a day for history, English, and Bible. So I would say 1 hour a day per history and English is about right.

[Nan in Mass]

Mine spends about 1/2 an hour a day, with about an hour on the weekend, on history/geography, plus some summer reading, some field trips, travel, and a few papers per year which are written during writing. Writing isn't a class but just a requirement of a paper per week (this year - last year it was a slower process so it was every two weeks, about). This year, a paper takes him 4 or 5 hours, from start to finish. We aim for short papers because writing is still a bit of a struggle. Normally, we read literature and discuss it about an hour a day, most days, and they do some extra on their own on vacations and during the summer, but this year my son has speech at CC. This is a 2 3/4 hr. class, plus between 2 and 4 hours of prep. Some of the literature is more like history, and some of the writing is for science, and there is time spent on current events, so counting hours is a bit messy. Not counting summer reading, I think history/geography/language arts comes out to be about 15 hours a week this fall.

 

How on earth are people managing to do an hour of English a day, including reading and papers?

-Nan

[Chris in VA]

You know what--I don't truly remember keeping track very well. I would assign something in Omnibus (9th grade, using Omni 1), and we'd take as long as it took to discuss the answers to the questions. A few weeks into it, as I noticed discussions were pretty brief and not very well prepared, I required ds to write out the answers and look them over before we met. Our discussions usually lasted about 30-40 minutes, I think--I'm not really sure,but that sounds about right.

However long it took him to do the reading, write out the questions, write the summaries, etc., I didn't keep track, he just did it.

 

I think he spent about 40 minutes to an hour, reading every day, maybe less, maybe more, depending on the difficulty of the material (Omni 1 is pretty dense in spots, and there's a lot of longer assignments in Genesis, for example). I have no idea how long it took to write out the answers. He also read history, so I'm thinking maybe a total of 2-3 hours a day for history, Bible and lit. (We skipped most of the secondary lit in Omni 1, adding in other stuff--I usually assigned 30-40 pages a day for reading extra things, like Quo Vadis and Ben Hur. He also did a devotion in the Bible every day--I didn't count that as time in history, lit and Bible Study, but did count it in the Theology/Bible course.)

 

I didn't require enough writing, I know that.

Edited October 28, 2010 by Chris in VA

[regentrude]

How on earth are people managing to do an hour of English a day, including reading and papers?

 

I find it really easy. My DD is expected to do five hours of academics a day. We have planned for five credits - math, science, English, history and French. That works our to about five hours a subject per week. She does not work on each subject every day, it just averages out. Some weeks all she does for English is read. Some weeks she writes a lot.

[Pam L in Mid Tenn]

Our academic goals change monthly.

 

For October:

12th grade: Literature reading... about an hour per day. "Fun" reading.... about an hour per day. She chooses classics so I count her "fun" reading. She had ZERO written assignments this month. Even our discussions have been really quick. Basically, "what did you read today?"

 

10th grade: Literature reading... about an hour per day. No written lit assignments. A few quick discussions. Also, grammar....we did about 30 minutes per week of teaching and orally parsing sentences together. He did about another 30 minutes per week doing workbook sheets. (Easy Grammar). Also writing.... about an hour per week of IEW instruction with another 2 to 3 hours per week outlining, writing rough drafts, making corrections, discussion of mistakes, writing final draft. I can't remember how many "final drafts" this month.

 

October was an easy academic month for us. Car trouble, car accidents, sickness, doctor's appointments, trip out of state, I began working part time.:tongue_smilie:

 

I'll probably spend most of today planning Academic Goals for November!

My 12th graders needs literature essays this month. My 10th grader NEEDS spelling. BAD. LOL

[Zanyan]

My daughter and niece take a Humanities/English class at a public charter ISP. They will each get two full credits (in California, that's 20 high school units) for the class. The class meets 6 hours per week. For English, in class, they do grammar assignments, literature analysis, written responses to art, poetry, film, selected readings, etc. Outside of class, they have additional work to do, which takes them at least 4 - 6 hours per week to complete. They each have Word Skills vocabularly workbooks for their respective grades. They are expected to complete a unit per week. They work on one novel per quarter, so they read their novel (just finishing To Kill A Mockingbird). They respond to comprehension questions regarding each chapter of the novel as they read through it, and this week, they're working on writing their character analysis essays. They have had quite a bit of "response to" writing this year, but this is only their second formal essay due.

 

For Humanities, they complete two World History packets per month: 10 - 15 pages of reading, and about 20 pages of questions to answer. They have done a couple of research projects, and have had to turn in two essays regarding their research, and give short oral presentations on their topics. They also do work in class, but I'm a bit fuzzy on exactly what that work entails.

 

As an aside - the other day, my daughter, a Freshman, said, "My Humanities class is fun and all, but it sure is disorganized. I enjoyed history so much more the way we did it...in order, like a story I was listening to through the years!" Thanks, WTM! :)