Today is Friday, September 25th, 2026, and I’m William Michael. I’m the headmaster of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. Today I’d like to take some time to talk to homeschooling parents to help them understand how they should think about the studies of their children, how they should manage their studies, and how those studies turn into academic records. Because I think that many—I would say most—homeschooling parents don’t understand the significance of academic records, don’t understand what academic records actually show for their children. And this leads to many false ideas about what the kids need to do and about how to manage their studies.
So as a school administrator and a homeschooling father who has been in education full time for almost 30 years, I’d like to share some of the behind-the-scenes information that parents need, because they are school administrators. Homeschooling parents are legal school administrators, and very few of them have any training or experience in school administration. Most of them have experience only as students in schools, or maybe some as teachers in schools—very few. And others may have experience as parents in schools. But very few of them, if any, have experience in curriculum development, school administration, records processing, and so on.
So I’d like to offer some help to homeschool parents to allow them to fulfill their role as the administrators of their children’s schools as they work to homeschool through the years. So I’d like to take some time to explain what high school transcripts represent, what the content on transcripts actually signifies, and what it doesn’t signify, because this will clear up a lot of problems, relieve a lot of stress and anxiety, and allow parents not only to fulfill their duties to their children, which should be their main focus, but to actually enjoy the process and realize that it’s not as difficult as many make it seem. This is especially bad in the homeschool world, where homeschooling publishers exploit this ignorance in Christian parents and make them think that they need to do things that they don’t actually need to do.
And let me say before I begin: I founded the Classical Liberal Arts Academy in 2008, and it’s a fully accredited school program. So when I talk about these things, I’m not some wild voice in the wilderness. I’m not some sort of revolutionary who doesn’t believe in the system and all that. I run an accredited school. I sit and discuss things with accreditation evaluators. They look at the work we do, our records, our system, and approve it all. So the advice that I give—even though it may come from what may seem like a radical place in educational circles, as a Catholic classicist teaching the classical liberal arts—the things that I’m sharing are entirely relevant and modern in an educational sense.
What school records represent
So let’s first deal with the most important misunderstanding in school administration. When we look at school records, many parents think that school records represent quality of education. We grew up as kids not thinking about the schools we attended. We just went to school, whatever school that happened to be. And we did our work as students, and then we got grades, and we got report cards, and we brought our report cards home as if they were signs of whether we were intelligent or not, whether we were good students or not, and so on. And we brought them home and our parents looked at them—parents who usually had no idea what we were doing in school. And if we got good grades, they rewarded us. And if we got bad grades, they often would punish us.
And so we are trained, or were trained, to think that our report cards and our school records were some kind of testimony to our intellectual ability and quality of education. And the reality is that that’s not true at all. That’s not what school records represent.
And I’d like to just ask you to think about records like a high school diploma and transcripts that are being sent to a college admissions representative. These representatives may be familiar with a certain school. They may have admitted students from that school in the past. But they have no idea of what any individual student’s experience was in that school. They don’t know who the teachers were that the student had. They don’t know what the rules of the classes were, what the syllabi contained, how grades were determined by those teachers. They really have no objective knowledge of what those students experienced in the classes that are listed on their transcripts.
The transcript is simply a record of time. This is the most important point. The high school transcript is a record of time spent on certain subjects. And what a college admissions representative looks for is to see that a student has a record of time spent in all of the necessary—the minimum—subjects, and then to see what the student did above and beyond those minimum requirements. It’s a document that measures time.
And I can prove that by pointing to the fact that it shows credits. And if we ask what a credit is, it’s a measure of time, or a unit of time. On a high school transcript, one credit is equivalent to 120 hours of instructional time. And if we look at the modern, let’s say, public school schedule, we see that that’s how the school is actually organized. The school is in session for 180 days of the year, and classes meet on average for 40 minutes per day. Take 40 minutes, or two-thirds of an hour, and multiply that by 180 days of school, and you have 120 hours. That’s what a credit represents. It’s a measure of time.
So when we look at a student’s transcript and we see that the student earned one credit in English in ninth grade, what that means is the student was under the direction of a teacher for 120 hours in English in ninth grade. It’s a measure of time in a certain subject.
When we look to the grades on the transcript, we see that a student received an A or a B in a certain subject. We have no idea what that actually means. We have no idea what content was taught in the course. We have no idea what the assessments consisted of. The teacher made the assessments. The teacher decided how the grade was to be calculated—you know, 40% for participation, 25% for exams or tests, 10% for homework assignments. We have no idea how the grades were calculated or what they represent. All that we know is that a student who receives good grades was relatively approved by the teacher, and students who received bad grades for some reason were not approved. In fact, students who try their best, have good spirits, and do their work usually get, at the worst, a C.
So grades on a report card are very vague, and they’re only used as relative signs of how well a student did relative to other students as well. Because the colleges look at grade point average, class rank, things like that. Notice what they’re doing. They’re comparing students—how those students were evaluated in a general sense—with other students. So it’s none of this detailed evaluation of the quality of their education. Colleges don’t look into the details. They don’t collect syllabi from high school courses or contact teachers and dig into what content was covered, what assessment methods were used, and so on. There’s no knowledge of those things. And we all know that.
Separating personal goals from academic records
So when we think about preparing a transcript for our children, we should realize what we’re being asked to do. And we should also realize that we are the teachers and school administrators. We are the ones who assign the grades. We are the ones who determine what content goes on the transcript. And no one asks us to do anything other than that.
So we need to understand what the purpose is, because what I have seen in my experience working with homeschool families is that parents don’t really understand what they’re doing, and they end up creating standards or setting goals that are totally unnecessary and end up penalizing their own children. They end up penalizing their own children. And this is what I want to help parents avoid. I don’t want homeschool children to be penalized by their parents’ misunderstanding of the purpose of academic records, like transcripts.
So I’d like to explain what parents should think of. And the most important thing we need to do is separate. We need to separate our own personal goals for the education of our children from their academic records. These two things belong to two separate worlds. Our own personal goals for our children’s education and their academic records are two separate things, and we can’t allow them to get mixed up together. If we do so, we’ll likely begin penalizing our children.
So we need to look at academic records as nothing more than records for use in modern academic or professional circles. The transcript is not being submitted to God for judgment on Judgment Day. The transcript is being submitted to a college admissions board or an employer or a military recruiter who’s looking for very basic information about the student’s education. These people are not looking and asking the question: Has this student mastered the art of composition? Has this student memorized all of his arithmetic facts? Does this student have a comprehensive understanding of Catholic doctrine? Does this student know the chronology of Roman history? There is no person reviewing a student’s records asking objective educational questions like that. They’re looking to see that minimum requirements have been satisfied. And they’re comparing the transcript to the transcripts of other students. They’re not comparing it to some divinely inspired, perfect transcript. They’re comparing students who have applied for a certain position or a certain spot in an entering class, because they’re trying to choose the top 100 students or the top 1,000 students, and they’re comparing them for their content.
We’ve got to keep academic records for use in modern academic applications separate from our own personal parental goals for our children’s education. There are many subjects that our children need to study that really don’t even belong on a transcript. They can’t be turned into some transcript information. There’s no artificial grades for those studies. There’s no way to represent that in a simple document for academic records. And we shouldn’t allow academic records to limit that education. And we also shouldn’t try to turn that education into academic records. These are two totally separate things. We’ve got to prepare each of these and manage each of these in their own context.
What the admissions office actually needs to see
So when you think about the transcript, you should be asking yourself: What does this person, this college admissions representative—what do they need to see? And if you ask them—if you don’t sit like a cloistered weirdo in your house wondering what’s going on outside—if you simply contact the college admissions office and ask them, “What would you like to see in terms of a high school transcript?” they can provide you with a template for a transcript. And they would actually like to see a student submit that template, because it’s most familiar to them.
If you take the standard college transcript, you’ll see just how little information they’re actually looking for. They’re looking for the student’s personal information. They’re looking for the dates of each of the student’s four high school years—what years they began and ended. They’re looking for the subjects studied in each year of their high school studies. They’re looking to see a number of credits, or a time unit, for the amount of time spent on those subjects. And then they’re looking in a general way at their grades and their grade point average, because again, they’re comparing them with other students.
Grading fairly
Now realize, if you decide to be strict and give your children low grades just because you have your own standard, and you say, “I don’t think that Tommy knows his English very well, so I’m going to give him a D”—does the admissions representative have any idea of what your standard of grading is? And the answer is no. And you can’t prepare academic records like that.
If you as the parent are determining the child’s grade, what you should be thinking is: relative to other students applying with my child, how does my child’s knowledge compare to theirs? In terms of, let’s say, English—composition, grammar, literature—does my child have better knowledge of this subject than the average high school student, or inferior? If I know that it’s better, why would I give him a low grade? So I’ve got to be careful that I don’t misrepresent my son’s learning. Just because my son hasn’t memorized all the works of Shakespeare doesn’t mean he deserves a C in high school English. In high school English, the standard is established by the public school system. And so when I think about grades, I should be thinking about modern standard expectations.
And a great way to measure that is by giving your children standardized tests. And you can do this at home. We offer these in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. If you give your child a standardized test for his grade level and he scores in the 90th percentile, he’s in the top of students his age. He should receive a grade that matches that standardized test performance.
The only time that you should consider giving a student a lower grade is if the student is defiant and disobedient and will not study, and you’ve got to drag him to get work done every day. Then he has no excuse. He’s not a good student, and that should be reflected in his grade. But if the student does his work and scores well on a standardized test, why in the world would you give him a low grade in a class? You would just be penalizing a student, because you would be mixing your own parental goals in education with modern academic records, which again doesn’t make any sense. So you’ve got to be very careful that you grade your children in a reasonable way when you put their academic records together.
Credits: the five core subjects
Now, thinking first about credits, because this is the most essential thing: you need to look at the student’s work in your homeschool and say to yourself, there are five main modern educational subject areas—English language arts, mathematics, modern sciences, foreign language, and social studies. And a child should have one credit for each of those subjects for all four years of high school. So if you do the simple math, it’s five credits per year multiplied by four years, which gives you 20 credits for, sort of, a minimum-requirement high school transcript. Each of those credits represents 120 hours of instructional time, and I’ll talk about that in a minute.
So if you’re thinking about the schedule for your homeschool, you should have on average 40 minutes for each of those five subject areas for 180 days of the year. Now, I know that it’s common in homeschool circles for people to say, “Oh, we do much less than that. We get all of our homeschool work done in two hours.” Those people are crazy. Those people are taking the bare minimum legal requirements for public education and setting them as the rule for their education, which is just mindless and crazy.
The truth is, you should provide 120 hours of instructional time in each of those five subjects as the minimum for your homeschooling. Now again, that doesn’t mean one hour per day. That’s over the course of the year. So 120 hours could be one hour for 120 days. It could be 40 minutes for 180 days. But over the course of that school year, the student should have 120 hours of instructional time for each of those subjects. And now, if there’s more time available, you can add additional subjects. You can add philosophy. You can add theology. And so rather than have five credits per year in high school, a student could have seven or eight or more—especially when you consider that you can study year-round, and even in the evening, as a homeschool family.
Now realize, when your child submits his transcript, and he does so as a homeschool student in a home that was dedicated to his education, he’s going to be judged relative to the opportunity that he had versus that of other students. So you can have students in a public school where they get dropped off by the bus at school at 7:30, and the bus picks them up at 3:30 and drops them off at home, and their parents don’t even pay attention to their education. Those kids have less opportunity for learning than homeschool kids do. And so it’s reasonable for an admissions representative to expect more, because they’re looking to see that a student in these favorable conditions for learning took advantage of them.
And so that’s why, when we go back to the parents who say, “We get our stuff done in two hours”—they’re crazy people. They’re doing the opposite of what homeschool families should be doing, and they’re severely penalizing their children. A family dedicated to education should have children who accomplish more in education. And it’s just for an admissions representative to look at such a student and say, “If he was raised in a family dedicated to his education, why does he have a transcript that looks just like the transcript of kids who were dropped off and picked up at school?” That shouldn’t be the case.
So think about that as you plan your children’s studies. By giving them more opportunity, you’re also raising the bar for their evaluation, as far as motivation and interest in learning is concerned. And selective colleges are going to look at that. They’re going to evaluate what the student did with the opportunity that was available to him. So you want at least one credit, or 120 hours, for each of the five standard subjects, and then anything that you can add to that is great.
Now, you don’t have to add full credits for additional subjects. So for example, if you want to do a little bit of philosophy—let’s say you cover 50 or 60 hours over the course of a school year—there’s no reason why you can’t add philosophy to the transcript and put 0.5 credits rather than 1. So you can have partial credits for subjects that are not studied as much as the main subjects. You can also put additional credits if a student does more. If a student did 180 hours of mathematical studies in a year—with instructional time, that is—you could put 1.5 credits for a certain subject.
So realize that those credits are units of measure of instructional time. That should be your first concern. Before you even think about grades or any kind of qualitative record, you should be thinking about the quantitative record, because that’s actually what’s most important. You’ve got to make sure that those subjects are covered with sufficient time, and you’ve got to be honest. God forbid we have Christian parents lying on transcripts. So you’ve got to cover the instructional time requirements—or expectations, I should say.
What counts as instructional time
Now, what does it mean, “instructional time”? What does this mean? It’s very, very simple. If a child goes to the library and picks a book—let’s say they go to the library and they grab a book about animals, and they go home and they read that book—that’s not considered schooling. That’s just leisure reading. The study is not being directed by a teacher. There’s no accountability. There’s no assessment. The student is just reading on his or her own. That’s not considered school time. So reading books is not part of that time that’s used to calculate credits.
What’s signified on the transcript is instructional time. And what that means is formal study time, where activities are being directed by an instructor—directed by a teacher. So it’s formal study time. That’s what instructional time means. So when we say a student needs 120 hours of instructional time in a subject, it means formal study time, not reading books.
So again, in the homeschool circles you’ll see this nonsense like “unschooling,” where the kids are just let loose. Those parents are not fulfilling their duties as homeschooling parents, and they’re lucky they don’t get in trouble for it. But that’s not formal study, that’s not instructional time, and that is not what’s supposed to be recorded on a transcript. As Christian parents, we’re accountable to God for these things, and we should be honest. We’re commanded by Scripture and by the Church to obey the laws of our country. And these laws are defined for us, and we should be honestly obeying them—not playing these silly games that many play in the name of homeschooling, which is actually the neglect of schooling.
So we want to provide our children with 120 hours of instructional time in whatever subjects they study that we intend to add to their academic records. So how can we do that? Well, first of all, as parents, you can simply schedule their daily time for formal studies, make sure that that time is covered by your schedule, and then keep that schedule. So as I said before, you can say, “We’re going to have these five subjects, 40 minutes per day, for 180 days each year.” And if you keep that schedule, you’ll be able to add that instructional time.
Now, as far as what activities can be counted for instructional time: as I said, they’re activities that are directed by an instructor. So there is direction, there is accountability, there’s evaluation, and so on. That’s what instructional time means. So for example, if a parent sits with a student and has the student read a lesson aloud, that’s instructional time. That’s supervised, directed, accountable, evaluated time spent with an instructor. So something that’s simple—read a lesson together for 20 minutes. That’s 20 minutes of instructional time. Any assigned work, any supervised activities—that’s instructional time. Any quizzes, any assessments—that’s instructional time. Watching a video where someone with expertise in a subject explains a lesson—that could be instructional time if it’s supervised. Not that a kid just hits play on a video and then gets a half hour of credit; that’s not supervised time. So supervised, directed, accountable, evaluated time is considered instructional time.
So as homeschool parents, you can satisfy that in different ways. And just think of what modern schools get away with. I remember when I was in fifth grade, our teacher scheduled a class trip to McDonald’s. There was a McDonald’s about a half mile down the road, and we literally lined up and walked as a class to McDonald’s. We then got a tour of McDonald’s by the manager. They took us back where the cooks are, down into the basement where all the food is stored. They showed us how the whole restaurant works. And then we had lunch at McDonald’s. All of that was counted as instructional time for us fifth graders at Washington School in Edison, New Jersey. Teachers can put movies on for kids to watch in classes, and it’s counted as instructional time.
You’ve got to realize that this is what we’re competing with in modern schooling. And that’s why I say parents have to be careful that their children are not set at a disadvantage and penalized by their parents’ own standards or expectations, which are nothing like what’s actually being done in schools. I’m not saying that parents should do the bare minimum. But I’m also saying that parents have to be aware of going so far beyond what’s actually required and what’s signified by the transcript that their children are penalized.
Now think about how ridiculous it is. You could have a parent who says, you know, “Well, I don’t think that instructional time should be considered anything less than active recitation and memorization.” So the child does 15 minutes, and he gets only a quarter of an hour of time. And by the end of the year, he’s got only 52 hours of instructional time according to his mom’s rule. And his mom puts that on the transcript. She writes, you know, “Arithmetic, Grade 9, 0.5 credits.” Well, she has high standards, and he may know a lot of arithmetic. He may have a lot of important information memorized. But when a college admissions representative looks at that transcript, the kid looks like a dumb-dumb—like he finished only half a year of freshman math.
That’s the effect of having this expectation for personal learning mixed up with the high school transcript. You’ve got to think about how that person on the other side of the application is going to read and interpret what you put on that transcript. And it’s very easy for homeschool parents, especially those who have high standards, to penalize their children and leave them with a transcript that doesn’t actually represent their learning relative to their peers. And that’s what the purpose of a transcript is. It should have a certain standardized quality.
Planning realistically
So, getting back to instructional time: parents are free to do whatever they want to do, whatever they judge to be effective in accomplishing their goals for their children in these different subject areas. Now, if you think about that, it seems pretty simple—until you factor in all of the challenges of real life. Like the fact that parents likely have multiple children that they have to do this with; that parents have other things to do. Moms have houses to run. They may have family businesses to manage at the same time. They may have relatives—they may have sick relatives that require their care and attention. There are all sorts of circumstances that affect the availability of parents for individual students.
So even though the concept of instructional time is simple to understand, it may be difficult to actually carry it out consistently across an entire school year. So parents have to have a plan—a realistic plan—for how they’re going to do this. They can’t just make excuses and say, “Oh, well, I was pregnant, so for three months we didn’t even do anything.” Well, you can’t do that to the kids. If you know that trouble is coming, you need to make preparation for it. That’s what prudence is. It’s looking ahead, seeing trouble that may come, and preparing so as to avoid it. So all of those challenges of real life are not excuses. If we don’t prepare for those things, then we fail. They’re failures. They’re not excuses.
So we’ve got to think about that beforehand. We’ve got to ask ourselves—and this is where many homeschool parents get in trouble—we’ve got to ask ourselves: Is my plan for my children’s education realistic? Am I going to be able to actually fulfill this plan in my circumstances, considering the number of children I have, considering their different strengths and weaknesses, considering my own personal condition as a woman? Am I healthy? Am I pregnant? Am I responsible for other things? I’ve worked with parents who were responsible for elderly parents who had health problems and needed care. There has to be a plan for the education of your children that takes into consideration the reality of your circumstances and provides for it.
And so it’s very common for parents to go into homeschooling with all kinds of ambitious plans and no realistic plan for how that’s actually going to be done. And then they just make excuses, talk about how they couldn’t do this or that. But what they really did was they planned poorly, or imprudently, for the schooling of their children. And you need to avoid doing that, because you know that evils are going to come, you know that problems are going to arise, and you’ve got to have a plan that’s realistic.
The problem with bringing the K–12 model home
Now, when you look at most homeschool programs, what they do is they simply bring the modern K-to-12 program home. So we’ll have grade eight curriculum resources, and there will be a box of books and workbooks and resources for eighth grade studies. And we’ll buy that from the homeschool publisher and bring that home. But we also have a sixth grader, so we get that set. We also have a fourth grader and a first grader. So now we’ve got four different sets of curriculum materials, and on paper it looks like everything is provided for.
And this is the deception of this modern homeschool industry. On paper, when we’re buying stuff, when we’re ordering curricula and it’s being delivered to our home, it looks like we’re discharging our duties responsibly and we’ve got a plan. However, when it comes time to actually execute the plan, it becomes completely impractical, because the K-to-12 school model is not intended for the conditions of a homeschool.
Think about the difference—and I talk about this all the time. In a grade-level school, the children are divided into separate grade levels, and each grade level has a dedicated teacher who does nothing but teach that grade level. And many schools go even further, to have a specific teacher for a specific subject at a specific grade level. That’s what the teachers do. That’s how the school is designed. And it’s possible because there’s state funding paying for all those teachers.
Now you come home to the homeschool. You’ve got one adult usually working with the children during the day—usually Mom. And she’s got four children at four different ages, in four different grades, working with four different sets of books and workbooks and study materials. And you see what a dumb plan that is. Like I said, it looks good on paper. It may make sense when you’re placing that order, and everything seems so orderly, and the website’s set up so nice, and you just click this box and click that box, and that grade and this grade, and then you have a nice little total order. You click and make your payment, and you say, “Oh, I got it. I got my homeschool curricula all figured out for this year.” You’re not thinking about the actual execution of a homeschool plan. You’re just buying stuff for homeschooling. That’s what causes most homeschools to fail. They just do what the homeschool industry sells.
Now, what will happen is you’ll quickly realize that it doesn’t work—that you can’t teach four different grade levels at home with any kind of quality. So what happens? The standards start dropping. We get to a point where all the kids are doing is sitting at the table and filling out workbook pages each day. And when they’re done, we call it a day, because there’s no way to get through anything more than that. So the standards fall. The parents then reduce their education to the bare minimum standards. And that becomes the end of homeschooling, because the parents say, “We just can’t do it. It’s too much. I’m spending all day working with the kids, preparing lessons. Then I have to grade things. Then I have to send grades to this or that place, and I’ve got—it’s just impossible. We failed. We’re just going to send the kids back to school.”
Both of those errors—lowering the standards based on what can actually get done, and quitting because you’re trying to practice the modern K-to-12 school at home—both of those options are errors, and they both lead to failure. That’s the danger of the modern homeschool industry. It’s designed to benefit the publishers. It’s designed to benefit the programs making all the books and the materials and hosting the conferences where they constantly tell parents that everything is great, you can do this, it’s all going to work, everyone’s having great success. But that’s not people’s experience. They’re falling for this sales and marketing propaganda.
Why the Classical Liberal Arts Academy was designed as it was
And this is where I’d like to recommend the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, because I developed the Classical Liberal Arts Academy when I was a private school teacher and working in curriculum development in private schools. My wife wanted to homeschool, and I said, “Look, there’s no way you can do what the modern homeschool industry is selling. And I’m not going to let you do it, because we’re going to have good standards for our children’s education, and I’m not going to have a burned-out wife.” I’m concerned about my marriage as much as I’m concerned about my children’s education. I want both. And so we have to come up with a solution that actually works, because that is not going to work.
And so what I did was I developed the Classical Liberal Arts Academy to actually allow my wife, as the homeschooling parent, to serve my children with an education with very high standards—that satisfies my own personal goals for their education, what I consider to be my Christian duty to them, to provide them with that education—but also arranged it in a way that allows her to actually manage their education. And it relies heavily on technology to do this. And parents who want to play the “we’re against electronics, we’re against technology”—good luck. Because I don’t think that you’re going to be able to do well without the use of technology, which I consider to be a great blessing to us, that actually allows us to spare our kids from the problems of modern schools and give them a great education at home.
So I designed the Classical Liberal Arts Academy so that someone like my wife—who has multiple children to care for and doesn’t necessarily have expertise in all the subjects—can simply help the children to complete tasks that are prepared for them; where all of their activity will be graded, all of their activity will be recorded, all of their activity is prepared for them; and all that the homeschool mother needs to do is help her children follow an orderly schedule and complete daily tasks as much as they can. If she does that, everything else is taken care of. All of the grading is done. All of the record keeping is done. She can simply focus on keeping order in her children’s lives, following the schedule, and helping them with specific tasks. She doesn’t have to design the lesson plans. She doesn’t have to prepare the materials. She simply needs to help her children with their studies every day. And not only that, but she can also reach out and ask for help when she needs it, or have her older children begin to reach out for help when they need it, rather than hanging everything on her shoulders.
So the Classical Liberal Arts Academy was designed to actually serve real circumstances—Catholic homeschool circumstances. That’s what distinguishes the Classical Liberal Arts Academy.
How the Academy records instructional time
So the benefit is that when students work in our system, all the tasks are prepared for them. Quizzes, tests, written assignments are automatically graded. Everything is recorded. That’s all great. But children also receive instructional time for these activities, and their instructional time is also calculated and recorded. So as long as the kids are working consistently, their instructional time is adding up and being recorded, so that at the end of the semester—at Christmastime, at Eastertime, at the end of the school year—the parents can look at the records and see the totals of the instructional time in each subject area. And it’s that simple.
Now, it’s important to note that the instructional time that’s received in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy doesn’t have to equal the full time that’s going to be put on the transcript. So for example, let’s say a student is enrolled in the English Composition course in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. So they open up their course page, and there’s tasks listed for them to do. Many of these tasks the kids are going to sit and work on at their desk or at a table in the house. It may take the student an hour to get that task done. The parent can be supervising that and confirm that the student worked on this task for an hour. So that child can have an hour of instructional time working on that lesson that’s not recorded in our system, because it was done offline. The student can then come onto our system and take a quiz, and when the student completes the quiz, he’s credited with a half hour of instructional time. The student can then submit a written assignment, and when that assignment is completed, the student is credited with another half hour of instructional time. So that student would only have one hour of instructional time in our system but would have two hours of instructional time in the parent’s records.
So our instructional time records can provide a portion of the overall instructional time record. And what’s good about that is, if a parent says, “My son completed 120 hours in English this year,” even if the parent didn’t have records of all of that time, our records would show that there was at least a good portion of that that can be verified. And so it’s sort of a backup source of evidence for the time claimed by the parent. And besides, a student wouldn’t be submitting quizzes and written assignments if they weren’t also studying the lesson. So it gives reasonable support for the claims of instructional time made by the parent.
So our system is designed to do both of these things—I could even say all three of these things. First of all, it serves a real classical Catholic education—its goals, its standards, and so on. Most parents would not even be able to offer that. Secondly, it serves real-life homeschool circumstances. It doesn’t ask Mom to pretend that she’s the school principal, and the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth grade teachers in all subjects, and also the guidance counselor, and also the disciplinarian, and also the housekeeper, and also the business manager, and also Dad’s secretary, and also transportation service. It allows Mom to be Mom. And remember, I was concerned about my marriage as well. I want my wife to be free to be my wife as well. I don’t want her being a slave to the homeschool industry, trying to make their programs work. So it provides for real classical Catholic education; it provides for the real circumstances of a homeschool mother or homeschool parents; and it also provides for the real-life needs of modern academic record keeping.
And if parents learn to think rightly about record keeping, they’ll see that the Classical Liberal Arts Academy is designed to assist them—real life, real expectations. It’s very affordable. It’s very convenient. It keeps every child’s records separately. They are always accessible to the parents in real time. You don’t have to pay extra for a report or pay extra for a transcript. It’s all available. You can access that content at any time. And then, when the time comes to actually prepare final records for your homeschool, you can have all of the Academy’s records available to provide you with some guidelines. And then you can add to that your own additional time, additional evaluations, other courses, activities that are done outside the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, and so on—and have all of our records as evidence to support your claims on your children’s transcripts.
So that, I would argue, is the greatest benefit of the Academy: that it’s realistic and practical, even though its standards—as I said earlier, you might think, “This crazy guy teaching the classical liberal arts in the twenty-first century—this can’t be realistic.” I would argue that our program is more realistic. And that’s why we were able to get accredited on our first try and receive a high quality score for our school. It is realistic, it is responsible, and yet at the same time it serves those high standards and is practical for your actual work as a homeschooling family.
Conclusion
So if parents can learn to think rightly about managing their children’s studies—if they can think realistically about what they’re able to do and what they’re not able to do; if they don’t simply use being busy or pregnant or tired as an excuse to do less, but they say, “No, we’ve got to find a way to overcome these obstacles”—that’s the whole challenge. If parents are in that mindset and they’re looking for a solution that addresses all of those concerns, the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, I would argue, is the only realistic option. And I challenge you to put that to the test. But I would argue that the Classical Liberal Arts Academy will be found to be the best option, because it was specifically designed for those purposes.
You think you have a lot of kids? My wife has homeschooled ten children using our program. It’s effective. It manages their studies. They focus on tasks. My wife focuses on keeping order in the schedule and making sure the kids are working. She doesn’t think about grades. She doesn’t think about records. She focuses on her daily work, and that’s it. I, as a husband, enjoy a great relationship with my wife. She’s not stressed out, burned out, always distracted by homeschool stuff. She’s free to do many other things. She just became a Lay Dominican. She’s got time for a life. She’s a faith formation teacher in our parish. She’s not burdened by homeschooling, even though she’s raised ten children.
So it’s a solution for the real-life challenges of high-quality homeschooling. And it helps with everything—from the curriculum content, to personal goals we have as Catholic parents, to real-life obstacles and challenges we have to deal with in constantly changing circumstances in family life, and also the need for good academic records in the end. It provides for all of those things. And if you think rightly about education and how it works, you’ll see the benefits of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy.
So I wanted to talk about that and make sure that that’s clear. And I invite you to contact me if you’d like to discuss this further. I’m happy to talk on the phone. I’m happy to answer any questions you have by email. But I’d like you to have a realistic plan for homeschooling, so that you can accomplish great things, enjoy a high quality of life, and provide your kids with excellent records that don’t penalize them in the end—which is the unfortunate experience of many homeschool students.
So I hope that that’s helpful. I hope that that gets you thinking. And if other questions begin to pop up, or topics you’d like to talk about, get in touch. I’m happy to help you.
God bless your studies,
Mr. William C. Michael, OP
Headmaster
Classical Liberal Arts Academy
