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Angel
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| Posted: Feb 06 2013 at 4:20pm | IP Logged
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What kind of workload does your highschooler carry - particularly for 11th/12th grades?
I'm almost certain that my ds will be taking more outside/online classes next year, but -- to be honest -- I'm not sure what constitutes a "normal" workload vs. an unreasonable one. He's a very smart kid, but... not terribly motivated sometimes. He also loves languages, and so the bulk of his outside classes would probably be for languages, some of them at the college level (I hope). But I'm not sure how many languages a person can study in a year without overloading and bumping out other subjects said person might need in order to go to college.
I think right now that I'm thinking about all of this in college terms and not for high school... I know that I often don't think we do too much work and then I'm surprised to find that the kids (my older two anyway) are actually working at a much higher level. So I'm not really sure what my expectations ought to be.
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Angela
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Kristie 4
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| Posted: Feb 06 2013 at 5:59pm | IP Logged
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Oooh, I have been wanting to ask this right now too!
Listening....
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Kristie in Canada
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SallyT
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| Posted: Feb 07 2013 at 7:08am | IP Logged
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Do you mean workload in terms of how many subjects/credits per semester or year? Or how many hours to expect your child to spend working?
I think so much really depends on the child, the family, and how you all view "work" vs. "what people do naturally that happens to constitute learning." In terms of formal, scheduled work, I'm leery of letting my high-schooler overload himself too much in one direction, if that makes sense, because I know and he knows that to get where he wants to go in the next years of his life, he has to demonstrate that he's done a balanced, well-rounded, college-prep course of study. So we organize and schedule formal work according to the need to fulfill credits in the full range of subjects:
1. English: literature dovetails with history, plus a composition and grammar component
2. History: partly covered by reading for literature, but also includes some additional "spine/context" reading plus listening to Teaching Company lectures. I do tend to treat history/literature as more or less one class in terms of the time he spends on it, though for transcript purposes I separate them out again, if that makes sense.
3. Math: currently algebra 2, currently almost completely self-taught. We're looking into outside classes for higher maths, however.
4. Religion: dovetails somewhat with history, but also has its own reading.
5. German in an outside class two days a week, plus homework.
6. Science: would be the only thing he ever did, if left to his own devices. Currently an outside class (plus he does work in the bio labs as kind of a work-study arrangement, so he spends a good bit of time outside class with the biology profs). He would love to take six classes in science and forget everything else, but that's just not feasible. This is his hobby, though, as well, so he does a huge amount of unassigned reading in subjects relating to microbiology which, if I'd assigned them, would probably seem like a disproportionate amount of work in one subject. To the extent that I keep up with what he's reading in this area, I do count it as "school" reading, but it's not work that I've imposed on him.
At this point, I'm not sure how many actual hours a day he spends on actual work, largely because I don't see him for most of the day four days a week. My husband could tell me more about how long he spends in the science resource library studying! On a typical day, he has one class, or one class and a lab, according to the following schedule:
Monday: YMCA fitness class at 5:30 a.m., but otherwise no scheduled classes, so he works at home all day. His work takes up most of the day, but he takes lots of breaks.
Tuesday: 90-minute biology class on campus, the rest of his work done there. He goes in with Dad around 10, and they come home after the 5 p.m. Mass.
Wednesday: 90-minute German class on campus. home with Dad after 5 p.m. Mass
Thursday: swim class at 8, bio class and lab on campus, home after Mass.
Friday: 90-minute German class on campus, home after 5 p.m. Mass
On all these days, he's taking the rest of his work with him. I *think* he's still basically devoting his time outside a formal class on a given day to one other subject, plus math and any homework from his classes. So on Tuesday, for example, he might go to bio, then do his homework for that class and German, spend two hours on math, and then devote the rest of his day to getting his history reading done. On Wednesday he might go to class, do his homework, do his math, and then spend the rest of the day on the week's composition assignment. And so on. I know he doesn't do work for every subject every day -- he has some kind of rota that he's worked out for getting it all done.
Anyway, he has long days, with these two outside classes plus the work I've assigned. I guess I do expect a lot, though I don't necessarily think that that has to translate into my assigning a huge amount of output, for lack of a better word -- if somebody is writing a science paper, for example, I don't also ask for a written assignment in literature until that paper is done, whereas in school, and certainly in college, a kid would be writing several papers simultaneously. If he's keeping to a strict schedule in an outside class, I'm a little more laissez-faire and flexible about the reading schedule in my own assigned courses, which I design to be kind of overloaded anyway, so that we can back off if we need to. But I do push reading outside his own interest areas pretty heavily, because I am invested in this "You Will Know Something of the Canon of Western Civilization By the Time You Leave This House" thing. The science is important, and it is his love, but I figure that scientists need Plato and Dante and Shakespeare just as much as the rest of us! He's got the rest of his life to obsess over microbes . . . and if he sees their lives in terms of Shakespearean tragedy, so much the better!
I don't know if any of this is really answering your question, which seems to me really to be about balance among subjects and how much to let one interest predominate. It is tough, because obviously one of the beauties of homeschooling is that a kid has the time and space to pursue a particular interest and become something of an expert in it, without having to wait years and years to study what he really wants. On the other hand, I think there's a lot of value in pushing some version of a broad liberal-arts education in high school, because kids do discover unexpected interests and talents that way, and also because you can't, any more, count on a college education to deliver the sort of broad cultural literacy, especially in the Western Judeo-Christian tradition, that "liberal arts" used to mean.
So that's my two-pronged argument with myself against letting a kid "specialize" too soon, to the exclusion of literacies outside his particular area of interest, and I do push in that direction, though I let the interest take center stage and don't necessarily expect the other subjects to be his life in the same way. My humanities-oriented daughter did a relatively light complement of sciences, which she disliked, and our objective was to get through it, because we just had to do it. I back off a little on the literature with this current high-schooler, letting his interests in science and also history predominate. But he still has to read enough that I feel he can talk with relative ease about, say, the Trojan War and the Punic Wars and Augustine's Confessions . . . even if what he really wants to talk about are the bacilli he's growing in the incubator in his room.
Does this make sense at all? I hope that somewhere in all this I'm remotely addressing your question. As usual, I'm kind of feeling my way forward in this answer and probably making up my own version of the conversation!
Sally
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Kristie 4
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| Posted: Feb 07 2013 at 7:53am | IP Logged
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Makes lots of sense Sally. Thank-you for your insightful words.
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Kristie in Canada
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Angel
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| Posted: Feb 07 2013 at 8:17am | IP Logged
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No, that makes sense, Sally. If you substitute linguistics/languages for science, that's my son. I just don't want to encourage him to bite off more than he can chew, and then dump more stuff on top of that. At the moment, he'll probably be taking an online Latin class, another language at a local college (he wants to learn Japanese or Chinese), and I want to outsource chemistry. We'd also really love to get him a math tutor, but I'm not sure that will happen.
Ok, well more stuff to think about when I don't have the flu!
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Angela
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Martha
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| Posted: Feb 07 2013 at 9:02am | IP Logged
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By 11/12, they are taking 2 college classes per semester.
In addition to that:
One is also taking a 2 year 5 day a week half day trade program.
One is scrounging to get as much time in the air piloting as he can.
Both take one CLEP/AP or other exam per semester.
Pending what they are taking at the colleges, any subjects not covered are taken at home.
And they work part time when they can, usually seasonal work.
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Martha
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mooreboyz
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| Posted: Feb 09 2013 at 8:30am | IP Logged
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Angela,
My current 10th graders schedule includes the following:
Geometry - about 1 hour/ day
Logic - about 1/2 hour
World history - about 1 hour/ day with music/ art focus on Fridays
One year adv. novel/Vocab/lLatin - about 1 hour
Entrepreneurship - about 1/2 hour
Marketing - about 1 hour
Literature - about 1 hour
Piano - at least 1 hour
Biology - about 1 hour
He spreads his work out throughout the day and night. So, he isn't glued to his desk for 8 hours straight. Also, he does a lot of computer stuff on his own (learning programming, designing websites, etc.). I expect to have a similar schedule next year; but, it will depend on what kind of job he has. He also plays piano for our community center and for library functions which I'm hoping he'll do more of once he gets his license as I think this will look good on his college app.
Where online is your son learning languages so successfully? We struggled with Rosetta Stone for 2 years; but, the kids never really learned how to speak Spanish. It was just memorizing through seeing the word. I'd love for them to learn a language. We play some with Latin using Getting Started With Latin, but that's it.
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Jackie
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Angel
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| Posted: Feb 09 2013 at 9:18am | IP Logged
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mooreboyz wrote:
Where online is your son learning languages so successfully? We struggled with Rosetta Stone for 2 years; but, the kids never really learned how to speak Spanish. It was just memorizing through seeing the word. I'd love for them to learn a language. We play some with Latin using Getting Started With Latin, but that's it.
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Well, both my teens are taking Latin classes at =field_class_subject%3A24">Memoria Press Online Academy. They're currently enrolled in Latin II (Henle). We haven't had good luck with Rosetta Stone either. My son was trying to learn Japanese with Rosetta Stone, but he got frustrated because it was all conversational, and he wanted to be able to read Japanese, too. I got him the same Japanese texts that one of our local universities uses in their Japanese 101 classes and he's been teaching himself the characters from that. But I think it's far, far more effective to learn languages with a teacher of some kind. He did Ancient Greek (Attic) last year with a tutor (using Athenaze Book 1, which is what another local university uses in their classes), and that worked out pretty well, too. But then his tutor graduated and moved away. 
I've also just learned about Earworms, which is apparently a language learning app. We haven't used it yet, but it's on my list of things to check out. Largely because I can only pay for so many language classes, but my kid reads books with titles like, "Describing Morpho Syntax: A Field Guide for Linguists" for fun. I think he'd like to have a smattering of pretty much every language in existence, the weirder the language the better.
I appreciate all the feedback here about what your older teens are doing. It's giving me a better idea of what sort of work/opportunities to investigate for next year.
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Angela
Mom to 9, 7 boys and 2 girls
Three Plus Two
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4Real Forums : High School Years and Beyond
Topic: high school workload?
