But presumably this would be inventing under your parens' guidance, right? Some Virtues only apply conditionally to lab totals.
I would assume that you'd use lab texts. Plus you're still inventing the spell even if you have a teacher helping you.
I'd always (as a player, anyway) assumed that you learned from lab texts, and that your parents would be spending their season a year teaching you something more big-picture useful like arts or Magic Theory.
Even both your assumption would be in disagreement to applying Inventive Genius.
As for the assumption, that would typically mean having an apprentice spend many seasons with lab texts separate from the parens' teaching and separate than working for the parens. It is possible. But it is quite clearly not the assumption in Apprentices (see page 16, and do look at the errata if you want to check the numbers for experience).
HR have inventive genius applying to lab texts.
Edit: Also the apprenticeship thing of constantly helping is a bit silly. The master is gonna want to take time to read books, open items etc. Its just a very rough baseline.
Ah, missed that.
They can't open items if you're using their lab to work on spells yourself. Plus, they can't have you copying spells, fixing arcane connections, or similar other things they could have you doing while they are reading or opening items or something else. Note that you need 9 different seasons to invent all those spells on your own from lab texts. You also couldn't pull off most of those early on, without improvement in Arts and MT from scores of 0 and increased Intelligence as you get older. That means those 9 seasons come out of time when you are most useful to your parens since you have better Intelligence and MT. That's three full years of assistance at your most useful state that your parens is giving up.
I tend to agree with callen. The times when the lab in free (like when the master is reading) is a perfect time for the apprentice to do things like fix arcane connections or extract vis. And I tend to think that the apprentice helping is much more of a back-end thing. At the front end there will be a lot more seasons spent learning. But once the apprentice is trained, that's the time to use them in the lab.
Also, consider that an apprentice gets 240 points in Abilities/Arts, and 120 levels of spells. If you figure the average magus has a +0 Com, that's 12 xp/teaching season one-on-one. If you figure that the master gets the Ability training mostly through teachers or summae (except for Parma Magica), that leaves ~120 points in Arts and some number of points in Parma Magica to be actually trained. That comes to 11 seasons of teaching. The other four could easily include a one or two teaching spells.
The character creation rules in Apprentices aren't really suitable for making starting magi. If you do make a magus, going season-by-season for the fifteen years of apprenticeship, and even assuming you don't munchkin your parens, you come out with a magus who is rather more powerful than the default starting magus with 240 points in abilities and arts and 120 levels of spells.
When the magi reach the point where they can take an apprentice, we will use the rules in Apprentices. For starting magi, it's still "Detailed Character Creation" (ArM5, p. 28-33), as modified by house rules.
I stand corrected. I missed that errata.
Ever-so-slowly getting caught up on checking the wiki pages (I really need to figure out how to re-install the Random Page button one of these days).
- Don't forget to add your Spell Mastery abilities to the spells on Hope's character sheet
- Also, it doesn't look like you have enough PeTe to have Pit of the Gaping Earth: Pe 0 + Te 4 + Sta 0 + Magic Theory 3 + Default Aura 3 = 10, and it's a Level 15 spell.
If you include inventive genius and intelligence it just makes 15. I think those count?
I totally forgot about those Mastery Abilities1 
Yes it does, just. (I forgot that starting spells use Int instead of Sta. S'what I get for going off of memory. 
)
Alright updated Hope on the wiki with confidence, and experience from her intro thread. Plans for development
Hope
Spring 1220: Teach[sup]1[/sup] Tia and Jerry Magic Theory. Gain two (2) teaching xp.
Summer 1220: More of the same. Gain two (2) teaching xp.
Fall 1220: Study Magic Theory: A Primer SQ11+3 Gain fourteen (14) magic theory xp
Winter 1221: Study Magic Theory: A Primer SQ11+3 Gain fourteen (14) magic theory xp
Spring 1221: Write Tractatus on magic theory - Q12 Metals and Magical Resonance
Tia
Spring 1220: Get taught Magic Theory by Hope. Q15
Summer 1220: Get taught Magic Theory by Hope Q15
Fall 1220: Study Magic Theory with Hope Q11
Winter 1221: Study Magic Theory with Hope Q11
Spring 1221: Watch Hope write her magic theory Tractatus. Mechanically Practice Magic Theory Q4
Jerry
Spring 1220: Get taught Magic Theory by Hope. Q15
Summer 1220: Get taught Magic Theory by Hope Q15
Fall 1220: Set up Lab - starts with the spacious virtue
Winter 1221: Set up Lab - starts with the spacious virtue
Spring 1221: Add Gallery Virtue
[size=85]1: With her specialty of magic theory in teaching she has a teaching of one! So that's 3 (base) +3 (two student bonus) +5 (good teacher) +3 (com) +1 (teaching) = 15SQ each season for the students. [/size]