hours for credit

[choirfarm]

I guess I have always thought of credit as being for a certain body of work. I keep seeing everyone talking about the number of hours for a credit or a half a credit. But how in the world does that really work? How do you keep track of it? I mean my boys don't come and announce to me when they are switching subjects. I don't really have a clue how long it takes them. But also, it seems like time wouldn't really work to keep track. Let us take English. It might take my oldest child 4 hours to read Animal Farm. It would take my middle child an hour and a half. So if you have a fast reader, they would obviously make it through a lot more content than a slower one. Let us talk about math. My oldest one could do a Chalkdust lesson in an hour. That same lesson would take my middle one 3 hours or more. So I guess I just don't see how keeping hours really works.

 

Christine

[regentrude]

For math and science, we do take the content of one book as a complete course (say, geometry) and give credit for this certain body of work.

For self designed courses, I do count hours, and it is really simple. My kids have to keep track of what they do every day, write it down, and I put it into an excel spreadsheet that is programmed to add times for each day, and also for each subject.

In the end, I guess it comes down to your choice: either design a course with prescribed content and award credit upon completion - or award credit based on time. I have a fast reader and expect her to spend a certain amount of time for her English credit - so the fast reading means, she gets a chance to cover more material (as opposed to being done in less time). But I could also see somebody coming up with a prescribed course content and it takes the student whatever time necessary to get through it.

[In The Great White North]

I don't count hours and if your state doesn't require it, I wouldn't waste the time. How long a subject takes varies radically between students and when schools count hours, they make a lot of assumptions (all class time is actually spent on the subject, everyone takes the same amount of time to do the homework, etc.)

 

Certainly, none of the colleges ds applied to wanted to see a log of hours to justify his credits.

 

I guess that means I'm an advocate of the "prescribed content" method.

[regentrude]

I don't count hours and if your state doesn't require it, I wouldn't waste the time. How long a subject takes varies radically between students and when schools count hours, they make a lot of assumptions (all class time is actually spent on the subject, everyone takes the same amount of time to do the homework, etc.)

 

Certainly, none of the colleges ds applied to wanted to see a log of hours to justify his credits.

 

I guess that means I'm an advocate of the "prescribed content" method.

 

May I ask how you decide on a self-designed course how much content is appropriate and doable?

I find myself using hours as a guideline because, honestly, I have not the slightest idea how else to decide whether my reading list for literature is doable, fluff, or impossible, or whether my Art history course merits a credit. How do you do it - if you don't use somebody else's prepared courses?

[Mom22ns]

For us, we are required to track hours, so we always have and it's no big deal. My kids have a schedule for the day. Things they do on their own, they note the number of minutes they worked. I put them in my tracking software each day (takes maybe 2 minutes).

 

That said, I may check the hours my kids work for a credit, but the credits will mostly be assigned based on body of work. Math, science, history, and foreign languages for example, all have a standard amount covered to call a credit. Some of the electives such as band, pe, and computer programming are harder to see an exact amount of progress. Tracking hours on these courses helps me check for credit worthiness.

[Jenny in Florida]

For most classes, when we have a text or I've laid out a syllabus or reading list in advance, I consider completion of that work to be what earns the credit. However, there were a few classes for which my daughter earned credit that kind of developed over the course of the year.

 

For example, she earned a credit in 9th grade for a survey course in American musical theatre. We didn't start that with a text or a specific set of standards in mind. Instead, she saw a LOT of shows and went to meet and greet sessions with casts and directors and attended readings/workshops of new plays and watched the PBS video series and so on.

 

I searched online for syllabi of similar courses and couldn't find much. Finally, I decided the most logical thing to do was to keep track of roughly how much time she was spending on the subject. After some more research, I determined that a full credit would require 130 hours on task. So, after that, I just noted when she went to a show and the appromixate run time of live shows and videos, the same with lectures and talk-backs, etc.

 

She ended up devoting significantly more than the required 130 hours. So, she got her credit.

 

We approached credit for choir pretty much the same way, except that I gave only half a credit because I felt there was not enough instructional content to merit a full one.

 

Because several of the courses my son is doing this year are not text or syllabus based, I'm thinking I'll probably count hours for those, too. I don't think it needs to be excruciatingly exact, just a rough idea of how much time he's actually spending on the subject.

[Jenny in Florida]

May I ask how you decide on a self-designed course how much content is appropriate and doable?

I find myself using hours as a guideline because, honestly, I have not the slightest idea how else to decide whether my reading list for literature is doable, fluff, or impossible, or whether my Art history course merits a credit. How do you do it - if you don't use somebody else's prepared courses?

 

I know this wasn't addressed to me, but here's how we do it:

 

First, I check my copy of TWTM to see what is recommended there.

 

Next, I search online for syllabi and reading lists made available by schools.

 

That usually gives me a rough idea of what is expected in that subject area. Then, I try to plan a course that goes just a little bit farther.

[choirfarm]

May I ask how you decide on a self-designed course how much content is appropriate and doable?

I find myself using hours as a guideline because, honestly, I have not the slightest idea how else to decide whether my reading list for literature is doable, fluff, or impossible, or whether my Art history course merits a credit. How do you do it - if you don't use somebody else's prepared courses?

 

I can almost guarantee that you are doing more for your English course than most public schools. This what we did for 10th grade when I taught it 20 years ago: short story unit, Julius Caesar, grammar unit, and A Separate Peace. We had 4 quarters. I think somewhere we had another literature selection. We tried to do a major work every quarter with the exception of the short story unit. They did 2 papers a quarter. ( They were horrible!!!) My honors classes did 2 works every quarter and extra papers. The big struggle I had was getting the "regular" kids to read ANYTHING outside of class. I basically had to read things aloud because they didn't read outside of class and/or didn't understand what they read. The honors kids were better.

 

It is not any better today. One of my boys' friends was about to die because she had to read 40 pages of The Scarlet Letter in one week. My boys tried hard not to smile as they generally have to read at least that in one day. I typically have them do a novel in 2 or 3 weeks. The ps would have died with the rhetoric level TOG history readings. They cannot conceive of history without a textbook or reading that much.

 

So I'm sure you are doing fine!!!

 

Christine

[GailV]

The big struggle I had was getting the "regular" kids to read ANYTHING outside of class. I basically had to read things aloud because they didn't read outside of class and/or didn't understand what they read. The honors kids were better.

 

 

 

The local high school's 10th grade English class is reading Lord of the Flies and writing an essay on it. They're expected to do this NOW before classes start next week. I guess this is an example of how much schools vary from location to location. The class time is spent on instruction; the kids read and write outside of the 130.5-hours-per-credit class time. These are my kids' competition for college placement, and will be their classmates in college.

 

We do science and math as "lump credit" -- when you get the book done, you get the credit. It doesn't matter if it took you 12 months/250 hours of heartache and tears, or 5 months/100 hours, or whatever. On the other hand, counting hours is great for things like PE -- we're required to have a credit, and I can easily count up how much dd has done to figure out what else we need to do.

 

 

That usually gives me a rough idea of what is expected in that subject area. Then, I try to plan a course that goes just a little bit farther.

 

And THEN, after planning a course that goes a little farther, I tell them once again the story of my high school math teacher who said that one day we'd thank him for how tough he was on us ... I swore at the time I would never thank him because he was obviously delusional about how much work he assigned ... wow, I am so glad he was so rigorous, because he was the only high school teacher we had gave us a taste of what college was going to be like and how much work would be expected of us. So even though I'm now the Mean Mom requiring more per credit, someday it will pay off. I hope.