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Well, welcome to video number five, our second to the last video in our series on homeschooling through high school. In this video, we’re going to be looking at the option that our homeschooling students have, which I’ve called Grade 13. While there is no official Grade 13, I’ve chosen this name just because it does involve an extra year, maybe two, at the end of what’s typically Grade 12. So Grade 13, this whole approach is for or I’m offering this approach or this idea to a homeschooling family who wants to traditionally home educate through Grade 12. You know, grades 1 to 12, you want to traditionally home educate, you want to be in complete control of everything just like we mentioned in video number two, which looked at traditional home education. Now that’s you, you want to be following Charlotte Mason and/or unschooling or classical or any of the other methods out there, but eventually you do want your son or daughter to enter a post-secondary institution and perhaps that’s going to require a diploma, course credits, maybe some upgrading things like that, but you definitely are committed to traditional homeschooling from grades 1 to 12. Well, this option could apply to you. This option might be attractive to you.
The Problem with Upgrading
The only drawback really is usually from the student, because your student when he or she’s finished with Grade 12 wants to move on, wants to get out of high school, you know, wants to move on to bigger and better things. They don’t want to remain at home perhaps, or they certainly don’t want to still be in high school. I understand that, I’ve heard that, I can relate to that. However, please hear me out on Grade 13. What oftentimes happens with a family or with a student who has pursued the traditional homeschooling from grades 1 to 12 is they want to pursue post-secondary, logical, that’s reasonable. So that post-secondary says, “Great, you’re homeschooling, great, we support that. However, we need you the student to enroll in these upgrading courses.” And usually the home ed student doesn’t have any problem with upgrading. There are several places around the province that offer upgrading to adult high, adult students. Well, my opinion is, where I got the idea I guess, is that if you’re willing to upgrade and willing to pay the extra money, hundreds of dollars if not thousands of dollars for these upgrading courses because they’re not high school courses, these are courses from another institution, right? That could might be high school, I don’t want to say it’s not because there are some options out there, but anyway, the example I’m thinking of, let’s let’s look at an example which would be NAIT. A lot of our students go on to NAIT for trade school, and they don’t have a transcript, they don’t have a diploma, which is fine, and NAIT is very pro-homeschooling. They’ve even come to several, several of our conferences to let our homeschool students know that NAIT will welcome home ed students. So let’s say, let’s say it’s NAIT. Well, NAIT will say, “Yes, come to our school, our our institution, our college, but you’ll need to take some upgrading courses,” and that could take a year, maybe two, or, you know, a year and a half, whatever. But the point is, it’s extra time and it’s extra money out of your pocket.
The Grade 13 Solution
So my thought, my suggestion is to you is, use that same time but not money. Use the same time, the same year, year and a half, to earn course credits from Alberta Education. That would really take the place of any need of upgrading, right? Upgrading is kind of a nice way of saying you don’t have any course credits so you need to get some. That’s in the context of not having any courses. Yes, it can be a literal upgrade of, let’s say, a dash two to a dash one course, but when we’re talking about a traditionally homeschooled student who has no transcript, no credits, when you go on to somewhere else and they say you need to upgrade, what they’re really saying is you need some course credits, cha-ching, right? Money out of your pocket, extra time, fine, I mean, if that’s what you want to pursue, that’s your choice. But I just want to give you this idea that you you could have your son or daughter use that extra year, maybe extra two years, of high school eligibility for funding to earn course credits, so that when he or she goes to NAIT or goes to whichever school, he or she won’t need to upgrade, right? You the student will have English 30-1 or dash 2 or whatever, Math 20-whatever, right? Use the same time, but you don’t have to use the same money because it’s going to be “free” because your student’s still going to be eligible for high school funding.
Now the advantage of this, in addition to not requiring any more time, again, your student, your son or daughter, might have to be doing upgrading. Again, this is a limited context in terms of application, but let’s say you’re looking at another year of upgrading because you’ve chosen traditional homeschooling, you’ve chosen not to have the diploma route, so now you’re looking at upgrading. Well, why not just stay in school for another year or two? It’s not going not going to take you any additional time than it would compared to going to NAIT and upgrading. You’re going to save thousands of dollars, and you have the added benefit of earning course credits from Alberta Education as opposed to earning it from NAIT. I’m not picking on NAIT, I’m just saying that’s an example. You can earn course credits from NAIT that are recognized obviously by NAIT and will be recognized by a group of institutions that are part of an association that they’ve all agreed to recognize each other’s courses. But if you move outside of that small group of colleges or trade schools, those courses at NAIT aren’t going to follow you. They’re not going to be recognized, or they may not be recognized. You hope they will, but they may not. So let’s say you spend a year or two upgrading, you spend thousands of dollars earning or paying for these upgrading courses from NAIT, which are not Alberta Ed courses. They’re named similarly to Alberta Ed courses, but they’re not exactly named because they’re not Alberta Ed courses. There’s no diploma exam for any of their 30-level courses, and that’s because NAIT courses or any other course from a trade program, and again, not picking on them, I just want to give you the facts here, they’re not Alberta Ed courses.
So come back to Grade 13 idea. You’ll be, you the student, will be earning course credits from an Alberta recognized program. You’re going to have a transcript of these courses wherever you go. You will have an Alberta Education transcript that has these courses on them, as opposed to going to NAIT or Sage or, and I don’t even know all the colleges that are part of this small association that will recognize each other’s credits. You’re not limiting yourself. You’re giving yourself many options for the future. Oftentimes students will say, “Well, I’m doing this.” That’s true, you’re doing that for the next year. You change, you know, I think life has a habit of changing things. So you could change your mind five years from now, you can change your mind. I’m just saying with Grade 13, you are saving yourself time, you’re saving yourself money, and you’re giving yourself a transcript that will be recognized anywhere in Alberta and really the world, right, after high school. So let’s say you’re interested in this and or even yet, you’re planning on pursuing this. I think you’re getting the best of both because you’re getting the best of 12 years of traditional homeschooling where you are absolutely in control. If you’ve kept out Alberta Ed, if that was your goal, you’ve done it 12 straight years. And then in the in that 13th year of full eligibility, then you start looking at Alberta Ed. You’d be looking at Alberta Ed type courses at NAIT or anywhere else if you’re upgrading, so it’s not like you’re compromising or giving in or selling out by pursuing this Grade 13 approach.
The Strategy for Earning Credits
So if you’re interested, this is how I see it playing out. If you’re going with this option, then starting in Grade 10, and actually on 10, 11, and 12, as you’re traditionally homeschooling, you’re really going you’re going to start earning course credits through a challenge exam approach or you can, right? This is what I would recommend if you’re wanting to get a diploma at the end of this Grade 13. So the diploma requires 100 credits, 100 specific credits, but you don’t want to try to get a 100 credits in one school year. That’s tough, and Alberta Ed would likely give me a phone call and say, “How did Johnny get 100 credits in one year?” I don’t want to be in that situation, and that’s pretty impossible to do, really, 100 credits in one year. So what I am recommending is that you start in Grade 10, and you start earning options courses. Get your Phys Ed 10, which Alberta Ed offers to home education students as a pass/fail, and only to home ed students, so I don’t know if you knew that, but home ed students can earn 10 credits as a pass/fail. So get your Phys Ed 10, get your Calm 20, get your CTS modules, get pursue maybe if you’re pursuing music through the Royal Conservatory, you are guaranteed course credits for that. We can help with general music, we can help with all kinds of things, all kinds of electives. So be building up your electives, you know, up to 30, 40, or more, during grades 10, 11, and 12 so when you get to Grade 13, you the student really can focus on your core courses. There’s what’s called the waived prerequisite. It’s harder to to get, and you have, we have to apply for it, but the gist there is that you could leapfrog into Grade 12 language arts, which would be English 30, either dash 1 or 2, and when you let’s say you pass English 30-1 or dash 2 and get those five credits, well, you get the previous credits in that sequence of English courses. So you would get credit for English 10-1 and English 20-1 all by passing 30-1. You didn’t have to take 20 10-1 and 2-1, you just had to take 30-1 and you passed it. So you get these waived prerequisites. Some people say they’re retroactive credits, not technically, you know, if you want to be technically correct, they’re waived prerequisites, but you get the idea, they’re retroactively applied. Okay, you get 15 total credits when you pass 30-1 because you get 10-1 and 20-1, so 5, 10, 15 credits, and you can do that for all the four core. So we have options for you for homeschooling through high school. What I mentioned here for Grade 13 can apply in various ways, whether you’re doing whether you’re pursuing course challenge or distance ed through ADLC. You can add course challenge, you can actually pursue alter all three: course challenge, ADLC, and a Grade 13. So you do have lots of options, and we at THEE would love to be able to help you navigate all these details as you pursue homeschooling through high school.
