Efficiency of regular school? Well I wouldn’t say a fifth but…my children school from 8:30 til 2:10 close enought to 6 hours ( they have their lunch time play from 2:10 til 3:00 so even though I can pick them up at 2:10 technically school finishes at 3:00.
In that time they do grammar, spelling, math, science, plus an extra study. (physical education, art, music or library) I would like to say they read in class to but not all teacher actually do that, it’s always on the homework list though.
So to discover how effective this education is figure how long it would take to cover this study at home. Grammar 10 mins, spelling, 10 mins, science to do it properly 30 mins, math ( at school level) 15 mins tops, extra study 30 mins but more like 40 at home. So I could easily teach my kids all this in 2 hours. Based on time alone home schooling is 3 times more effective.
However I wouldn’t waste my time on half the stuff they do at school. So my time schedule would be somewhat different KNOWING I was teaching them something worthwhile.
Math 40 mins, reading 1 hour, writing ( including grammar) 30 mins, history 10 mins, geography 10 mins, science 30 mins, music 30 mins, art in your own free time ( why count it when they will do it anyway?)
So 3 and a half hours for a proper education at their level. Still makes school look sad 
even assuming you get a quality gifted education your time is better spent at home :yes:
I after school probably a total of 1 hour a day for the oldest, 30 mins for the next one and 10-15 for my youngest boy ( who is schooled in my class :biggrin: ) the hour a day has her 2-3 years ahead withing 1.5 years. The 30 mins gets her 1 year ahead with confidence.but that is harder to determine because I haven’t found her right level yet ( she is learning faster than I think she is) my boys 15 mins puts him at grade 1.8 entering prep ( nearly two years ahead at school entry). This small time commitment is rocketing them ahead at a rate of more than one year per year of schooling. The time commitment becomes greater as they get older but so does the gap between where they are now and where their peers are. I am not sure at what point school will become unviable, but I imagine it will be the same year for all three that I have to homeschool or get them into a gifted stream ( we do have one nearby I recently found out)
I didn’t even mention schooling all year round…school here is only 36 weeks of the year!
I need to stop rambling now…
I like the idea of collecting successes. That is exactly what you are doing. Each success is a credit point to you.
I would say advance cub as much as you can in these coming years prior to school age.
That is what I did with my son and by the time he was school age it was very apparent school would not be the right place for him. At age 5 he was doing 3rd-4th grade math, 4th grade language arts and reading on a high school level. My mother is a public school teacher and she was very against home schooling, but now she sees how happy he is. He completes school by lunch time each day and spends the afternoon playing, hiking, doing experiments. He has tons of friends in swimming and soccer and his behavior is good because he doesn’t pick up on those bad habits from other kids at school. Anyway as he became more advanced it was clear school would not be the best place for him, the options would have been to advance a 5 year old to third or forth grade (socially probably a poor decision) or put him in a class where kids are just learning the sounds letters make and how to count (probably boring for him which I worried would cause him to not pay attention and then be tagged as ADD or something, not to mention decrease his love of learning). In addition, I feel like if school is too easy for kids they don’t learn good study skills and how to apply themselves. Also, as they get older there is a social aspect to the “afterschooling” where they start to say “other kids don’t have to do this why do I?”, not to mention being tired after a full day of “school” and it being difficult for a tired young child to effectively afterschool and if you do afterschool then your evenings are not open for extracurriculars.
Anyway, by the time he was 5 she agreed that we were making the right choice “for now”. In fact, at this point my sister is now thinking about pulling out her kids to duplicate our efforts. My husband initially also thought, this was some sort of crazy experiment, but now he is aghast at the inefficiencies of the school system.
I can’t really add much more that the really good thoughts that have been contributed, but I guess I fall under the category of a teacher who wants to homeschool (only just qualified then stopped teaching to raise my son, so I don’t have as much direct experience of the school system as a teacher who’d been in schools for years - but I did go through one of the best teaching programmes in the UK so I do have some exposure to the system at various levels). I am in the UK and I am sure there are differences, but my perspective on schooling was negatively impacted by the teaching strategies that I saw being used especially in Ofsted rated Outstanding schools - namely teaching to the test. So even in the best schools, that achieve excellent results, the very structure of school i.e. periodic tests that determine what set (higher ability, lower ability, average) and final certified grades at fixed times, means it is very difficult to use the most effective learning methods (I believe to be the didactic/socratic method or what Charlotte Mason calls narration) MOST of the time - because knowledge ultimately has to be graded, it needs to be packaged in a gradable format. This is where I suspect some of the best private schools may have a clear advantage to Outstanding state schools - they exist for a totally different reason. State schools outstanding or not, seem to exist to hand of pieces of paper students can then use to get hopefully better pieces of paper called certificates. Some of these elite private schools though, seem to me, to exist to imbue the learning that shapes ‘natural’ leaders in almost all fields. There is a very clear difference in the workings that take place in various educational institutions.
I do not want my son to see learning as being about qualifications. I want him to see life and beauty and wisdom of the ages, and connect in deep appreciation with the people that shared them with us. So that he too may connect with his inner creativity and learn how to bring his visions into reality. This is why I thought I wanted to be a teacher - but I was told that I’d have better chances of having this sort of teaching experience in private school than in state school lol and they were right. That’s not what state schools are about - they don’t have the budget to measure how visionary their pupils are becoming :wub:
So I am hoping to homeschool my son through the primary years, so I can share my way of seeing life with him, then he can choose what he wants to do after that. I have to say, I agree with other’s suggestion to just EL as much as you can, it has worked for me too in getting my husband to even be open to me homeschooling - no one can really argue with results. It is like asking someone to imagine and have feelings about an alien - they cannot unless they’ve studied it like you’ve studied EL! I appreciate the challenges Linzy raised in afterschooling (I can see them being challenges for me personally) but if you are a Tiger Dad I’m sure you’ll be fine 
PS Definitely stay breezy with PokerMom while discussing EL, use humour often, so when the time comes she has a comfortable way of changing her mind without feeling like she is losing face. Keep up the good work! You got me swimming with Dougie after we watched Pokercub’s video together
thank you for the great discussion.
this will be an issue until it isn’t (so perhaps quite some time to come) - and as such, I welcome any ideas well into the future should you think of anything.
so far, many of the teachers that opted to home school seem to be the opposite of me in that they felt strongly that school destroyed the hunger to learn (I agree with much of the conclusion, but view the argument as a false cause). Well, my wife isn’t going to fall for that because her school is more progressive. It’s a strength, but also a weakness IMO. If I were running the school, I’d go in a completely different direction, but hey, to each his own right?
With that, here’s another tidbit - not only is my wife an administrator (maybe 3rd in command) but she attended the school herself as a child. For her kid NOT to attend the school would be a pretty big deal. She loves the place. I’m not against it, I just think you can destroy it head to head results wise for reasons Manda mentioned. The whole “drop your kid off at school” model is very much at a disadvantage academically regardless of the strength of the school. Well… maybe that’s not always true, but certainly on average it’s not even close (Manda saying homeschool is perhaps 300% more efficient)!
If you have one investment that returns X and then another that returns 3x with less volatility so that even a poor outcome was likely far superior to a good outcome of the first investment, would you ever opt for the first investment? I know I wouldn’t. Education is the largest investment we make in our children - and we’ve been conditioned to just abnegate and abdicate the one thing that parents have been doing since the very beginning of human kind, instructing our kids on the finer points of their surroundings to insure a safer and more productive life.
anyway, off the soapbox for now ha ha ha. sorry about that, I guess I’m in a weird mood :biggrin:
PS, please don’t take my comments as bashing compulsory school. There are other factors. If I homeschool, it will probably cost us more than if I sent our kid to private school due to opportunity cost alone. Not everyone has this luxury, so I’m strictly speaking in a theoretical sense here, not a practical one.