Thinking back to my own school days, elementary was something like 8:30-3:30 and high school was something like 7:30-2:30. That’s 7 hours in total, but yeah, if you include a 15 minute break in the morning, a 5 minute passing period, and a half-hour lunch, it’s only a little over 6 hours. I don’t recall elementary school well enough to remember a typical day’s schedule, but it was probably slightly less. I think you could still call 6+ hours with a few breaks 7 hours, though. Also, most kids do attend school 5 days a week.
My definition of “hands-on” is what you’d see in a typical public high school, with a teacher personally leading the lesson and guiding discussion, often using supplementary materials to help illustrate their point. This may include the occasional experiment and field trip. I meant specifically that the instructor needs to be hands-on, as in physically being there to teach the student, but hands-on learning for one’s child is also important, of course. Perhaps I should have included a point on multimodal learning and developing diverse lessons that will stimulate a child’s curiosity in a variety of ways. My intention was to differentiate the typical style of teaching from the very common form of “homeschooling” where the parent gives their kid a textbook and leaves them alone for the next 4 hours, patting themselves on the back for another good day of teaching. Even a boring PowerPoint lecture would be better than that. Homeschooling affords the opportunity to learn in unconventional ways, so to waste it all by spending every moment inside reading from a book would be a real shame.
I agree with your point overall, but kids don’t get 6-7 hours of ‘hands on’ instruction 5 days a week at school.
Thinking back to my own school days, elementary was something like 8:30-3:30 and high school was something like 7:30-2:30. That’s 7 hours in total, but yeah, if you include a 15 minute break in the morning, a 5 minute passing period, and a half-hour lunch, it’s only a little over 6 hours. I don’t recall elementary school well enough to remember a typical day’s schedule, but it was probably slightly less. I think you could still call 6+ hours with a few breaks 7 hours, though. Also, most kids do attend school 5 days a week.
My definition of “hands-on” is what you’d see in a typical public high school, with a teacher personally leading the lesson and guiding discussion, often using supplementary materials to help illustrate their point. This may include the occasional experiment and field trip. I meant specifically that the instructor needs to be hands-on, as in physically being there to teach the student, but hands-on learning for one’s child is also important, of course. Perhaps I should have included a point on multimodal learning and developing diverse lessons that will stimulate a child’s curiosity in a variety of ways. My intention was to differentiate the typical style of teaching from the very common form of “homeschooling” where the parent gives their kid a textbook and leaves them alone for the next 4 hours, patting themselves on the back for another good day of teaching. Even a boring PowerPoint lecture would be better than that. Homeschooling affords the opportunity to learn in unconventional ways, so to waste it all by spending every moment inside reading from a book would be a real shame.