My wife and I have been discussing the kids’ schedules for school. Granted, our oldest is only 7, but the needs of 5 children make setting the schedule critical for getting through the day.

One advantage of homeschooling is the ability to take advantage of kids’ passions - so when our son wants to do three days’ worth of math lessons, do you really want to squelch that in order to force his English lesson upon him? So our discussion kept coming back to how to maximize the flexibility of the school schedule without getting behind.

There’s the mainstream school method - a fixed time slot per subject, with any unfinished work pushed to the end of the day. Practical when teaching large numbers of students, but completely inflexible.

Then there’s the daily schedule - the books are divided by the number of weeks (usually 36) then the number of days the subject will be taught per week. That gives you the number of pages/lessons that must be done daily. Easier to tell at a glance if you’re ahead or behind, but if the child gets stuck on a lesson or passionately wants to do a few extra pages, you risk upsetting the overall schedule or running the school day into bedtime.

So what we’re going to try to focus on is something in between - monitoring the schedule on a weekly basis. The “quota” for each week is set in the lesson plan, but on a day-to-day basis the schedule will vary according to schedule. How far ahead or behind the student is will be determined at the end of the week, so adjustments can be made to the quote for the next week. This is something that my siblings and I did on our own late in our homeschooled years (high school level) but we’re experimenting in our homeschool with a first-grade aged child.

Does the plan sound familiar? Weekly quota, status meetings - yep, a lot like work, or even college courses. The boss in a company doesn’t sit over every employee’s shoulders daily to monitor their progress. The day isn’t broken up into 45-60 minute chunks to work on particular tasks like checking email, updating records, filing, and returning phone calls, with leftover work from each session pushed to the end of the day. Weekly, monthly, or quarterly goals are set and reviewed on a periodic basis in the real world beyond K-12 education. So why not start them on learning how to manage a daily schedule full of distractions and surprises from the beginning, instead of getting them used to “periods” of study for 12 years before shocking them in college with a whole new set of expectations?

Just one of the many reasons mainstream education is geared to bulk education, not individual development.

Technorati Tags: homeschool, time management, homeschooling, education