Boston Elementary, Middle Schools To Get a Longer Day

Many public elementary- and middle-school students in Boston may soon have a longer time to spend in school each day. A change, announced Friday by Boston mayor Martin J. Walsh, though yet to get final approval from the city's school committee and teachers' unions' full membership, would add 40 minutes to the schedule at schools not already under an extended schedule. Currently, most elementary school students have a 6-hour day, and middle school students' is 10 minutes longer, which means that high schools will now have by default the shortest day (six and a half hours) in the Boston public school system. From the Boston Globe's coverage: Teachers in the 60 schools would get an annual stipend of $4,464 for the expanded schedule, the mayor’s office said. The plan would be rolled out over three years, beginning with about 20 schools in the 2015-2016 school year, the statement said. Officials said it wasn’t clear which schools would be in the first group. Once fully rolled out, the plan, which would add up to about an extra month of learning per year for 23,000 students, would cost about $12.5 million per year. How long is the school day in your neck of the woods, and do you think it should be any longer?

Comments

Ouch

[Anrego]

This all makes sense and is probably a good idea.

That said, despite school having literally been decades ago, I find myself empathizing with the kids on this one, who I'm sure arn't seeing this as an investment in their future but rather yet more time spent in the dungeon. I didn't exactly hate school growing up, but damn if I wasn't ready to get the hell outa there when the bell rang.

Maybe it's because we just had Christmas and that always puts me in a nostalgic child like mood. I'm sure if they announced this in September when school is just getting back into session and screwing up my morning commute I'd say to hell with the kids, but for now, the kid in me say: BOOOO!

Quality Vs. Quantity

[Greyfox]

I moved every three or four years growing up -- I was a military brat. Luckily for me, Dad was stationed at a post in upstate New York for most of the time I was in high school. I attended a very high quality high school there, so I have a first-hand basis for comparison between good educational systems and bad ones. The school in New York could get more done in a 40 minute class than the bad schools I attended down south could manage in an hour. We'd get in, get right down to business and get out before we had time to get bored. Class sizes were smaller and the teacher didn't have to spend 20 minutes getting everyone to settle down.

The difference in focus was apparent as soon as you walked into the building. The school in New York had posters for good colleges and educational awards on prominent display and had very little focus on sports. Despite this, they had a much better PE program -- they had an Olympic-sized swimming pool and offered elective options for cross-country skiing and archery, among other things.

The schools I attended in the South had larger, longer classes and were entirely focused on football. If your aptitude didn't fall into the range of something to do with football, they pretty much just wanted to waste your time until they could kick you out into the real world with a promising career as a gas station attendant to look forward to. You were either a future football player or a future football viewer. That's all they knew how to do.

What no one in any school ever told me was that I was the captain of my own fate. We all are. So if your school is bad and you don't want to grow up to be a gas station attendant, you'd better find some other way to learn the math and science that today's careers demand. The world isn't going to get any easier.

Re:Keep the kids longer and don't send homework

[Ol Olsoc]

he parents all agree their child should be taught math, so the debate should be between educators on *how* to do it. I guarantee you that there would be next to no debate if parents were not asked to help with homework. If we limit what we teach to what all parents understand, then we're done. Turn the lights off and crawl back into our caves.

This got me to thinking, and I would love to see it tried in a classroom as an experiment

I positively stunk at math and algebra. It didn't help that the teacher was as inspiring as poi, but still I stunk.

Then in my electronics courses, our teacher taught us how to use the slide rule. At that point, the mechanical adaptation of numbers to most functions just made something click in my mind. I did a 180 on math subjects - even without using the slide rule. Just by luck, I was in on the last class to learn the use of slide rules in my area.

This isn't a get off my lawn thing. I just think that the way the slide rule presents the numbers, and the obvious relationships between the different rules, and the way it trains you to use notation are just something that might help students learn math subjects. To this day, I keep a slide rule in the garage. The batteries on those things seem to last forever.