Today is the last day of homeschool until the New Year. We are now three weeks ahead of the local government schools. They are scheduled for only 170 days this year while we are scheduled for an additional two weeks or 180 days. In addition, the kids actual study for about six hours per day not including the time they spend in the evening doing corrections, spelling, reading aloud, etc. The official amount of time the kids are at the school is six hours twenty minutes at the elementary school and six hours thirty-five minutes for the middle school. We think that it is way too generous to believe the government school kids are actually studying four hours per day not including homework. Using those numbers and assuming the evening work of both groups of students is about the same, we calculate that Kelly and Christian have spent about 486 hours studying this year while the government school kids have spent about 264 hours studying. That means that Kelly and Christian have about a 222 hour advantage. This is equivalent to well over a month and a half of six hour days. The advantage is only going to increase as the year continues.
This coupled with the socialization disadvantage of the government schools and the significantly better curricula we have chosen give us confidence that we made the correct decision when we opted to homeschool Kelly and Christian.