I’m actually writing this post offline. We’ve had no Internet access since Sunday. The powers that be said something about our having a slow connection and an outdated modem. I swear it feels like a whole new dark age. I’ve determined that pre-Internet I had managed to be very constructive. I hadn’t really considered my prior output before. I was taking about 24 credits per college semester, and holding down two part time jobs, adding up to regular full-time hours. During this time, I also managed to make the Dean’s list and graduated a year before time. Now however, it almost feels, as my Mother so aptly puts it, that I’d as much as drown in a bucket full of water. I find that I overwhelm easily, and after no Internet for the past few days, I’m fairly convinced that the Internet, or rather, my propensity to surf the web for any reason, several times per day, is behind my general (as of late) lack of productivity. Not having Internet access therefore, has been a bit of boon. It has meant that I’ve begun to engage in more productive endeavors, some which I had been frankly dreading. One of these was starting to formally put together E’s high school transcript.
Of course, it would occur to me to put together my daughter’s transcript on a day when I wasn’t able to locate the transcript book I’ve kept on-hand for-like-ever. And as the Internet was down and I was unable to check transcript guidelines elsewhere, I resorted to the one small section on transcripts in The Well Trained Mind for some direction. Per TWTM, traditionally, 120 hours equals one credit, but this may vary by state or district. Not having access to our state’s or district’s guidelines at the time, the first thing I did was look over our records, and our previous schedule, to nail down the approximate time spent per subject. I made sure to keep track of time spent on independent work (for everything besides independent reading), as well as one-on-one tutorial-like times with me. What I ended up with looks something like this, based on a 36-week schedule (Note that Language Arts was the hairiest, and my projections for next year are hairier still):
Language Arts – 396 hours
This included time for spelling (2x/wk), writing (4x/wk), interdisciplinary writing (2 days/wk), grammar (2x/wk), rhetoric (2x/wk), and logic (2x/wk), and finally literature (2x/wk). Considering we were only able to fit five of the about eight books I wanted to have E read this year, I was thinking that more time should be dedicated to literature next year. And yet already, under the big language arts umbrella, we’ve managed to log in at least two classes’ worth of hours. And this doesn’t even include vocabulary, which we sort of dropped by the wayside.
Other subjects were pretty average in terms of time. E spent about 180 hours on Algebra I, and we still haven’t completed the book. I was thinking we could work on the remainder of the book this summer. I don’t recollect ever completing any of my texts in high school or college, and I do remember we did a lot of skimming and skipping around, yet I can’t get myself to do the same with E. She’s totally her mother’s daughter, as she’s shot down any ideas of skimming as well. So we’ll persevere a bit longer.
Science (Chemistry) came to about 144 hours, counting projected time for all labs, which we’re still in the process of completing.
History came to 108 hours, as did Latin.
I counted our time at Kung Fu, Tai chi, kickboxing, and weapons classes under Physical Education/Health. I added only the time for our regular classes, and not for any of the additional seminars and extra classes we take from time to time. Still, this all came to a whopping 216 hours.
We really dropped the ball on our elective classical language, i.e. Koine, having spent only about 36 hours on it all year long, with two brief sessions/wk, not nearly enough time to count for much credit at all.
In addition to the above, E took three homeschool art classes, about 2 hours each—again, not nearly enough to count for much credit.
She put in 42 hours volunteering as a CCD classroom aide, and then there was some time (not a significant number of hours at all), involved in a volunteer capacity at events and such at our Kung Fu school. I didn’t log in times for that, but I suppose I could have. She had scant involvement in our church’s youth group, so I didn’t add that in either.
This all came to, not including the art classes and volunteer work, approximately 1,188 hours for the entire year, including the 36 hours for Koine, which I’m considering just lumping in with Latin, under the “Classical Languages” header. This comes to approximately 6.6 hours/day, based on a 180-day schedule including the physical education, and 5.4 hours/day without the physical education hours added in. I thought that that was fairly standard. Oh, but I just realized now that I never considered the time she’s spent with her Dad on learning computer applications and typing. I’ll have to discuss times spent on those with him, but even so, I think that will only come up to enough hours to account for about a half credit in technology.
What left me a bit unsure was how to account for the extra hours logged in under language arts. The Well Trained Mind offers an example of what to do in such a case. The example is associated with the great books study recommended in the text. According to the example, 320 hours’ worth of study can translate into a full elective credit for literature, and one full credit for history (provided of course, you follow the guidelines in the book and your study involves historical documents and source readings). Go figure that the few books we “cut” due to lack of time, were the autobiographies that correlated to our history studies. But in our case, as we were covering U.S. History 1 anyway, it would have made more sense for those readings to be added onto the time spent separately on history. The individual parts to our language arts study, as mentioned above, were: spelling; writing; grammar; literature; rhetoric and logic. I figured that the most common sense way to sort these into groups was to lump spelling, grammar, and literature under the English 1 course title, and put writing, logic, and rhetoric into another group under the Speech 1 course title. The latter would count as an elective, and fit under “Speech” as rhetoric is classified in TWTM. It made sense to lump the logic and writing together along with the rhetoric, and I’m relieved to have that settled.
I’m still nowhere near done with this. I still have to check my state and district guidelines, find that dang transcript book (I swear I saw it just a few days ago, but where could it be now? It’s anyone’s guess.), and figure out how to put it all together and make it look as official as possible. In addition to preparing the transcript, I’ll be gathering materials for a portfolio of representative work. I’d like for it to include a cross-section of examples ranging from typical assignments, to quizzes, tests, lab and project photos, as well as reports and response papers.
If anyone is out there and has had experience with writing transcripts, I’m all ears, and open to some been-there-done-that advice!
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