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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?
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!
No need for school to start at the absolute butt-crack of dawn. It's actually been shown to be harmful for teenagers. Their natural sleep cycle involves sleeping in. Many of them simply physically cannot function so early in the morning. (Thinking is a physical process...)
If high school started an hour later, the kids would be on the streets less while parents are off work, too. So it seems like a win-win, without actually increasing the number of hours of instruction.
Increasing the duration of school won't automatically improve education. "No Child Left Behind" certainly didn't, but it did require greater duration to the school day if you actually met all of its requirements.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It is ludicrous to make the assertion that adding 40 minutes of time to the school day will magically add a month more of learning. The mentally that more time in school equals more learning is very flawed. We have setup our school like little prisons with strict rules and rigid schedules. Real learning doesn't take place while students are sitting at their desk listening to a teacher droning on an on. Real learning takes place when kids are actively engaged. They should invest their money on creating an alternative, project based educational program.
Meh, quality is what it is about, not quantity - the school I went to had a 9am to 4pm school day and was doing well in rankings, but they decided to do a fairly major restructuring of the school day in order to shift more lessons before lunch (they had a research project for a year prior, which showed the two lessons after lunch had a much lower engagement level than lessons before lunch). By starting 20 minutes earlier (8.40 start) and cutting 20 minutes off of the hour lunch, they managed to have four lessons before lunch, one after, and actually managed to shave an hour off the school day, meaning we got to finish at 3pm. Even the kids loved it, and the study done after showed a massive uptick in engagement in both the single lesson after lunch, and the one that had been moved to before lunch. The school is now topping rankings in the area as well.
Keep the kids longer and don't send homework.
For many children, success in school depend on 1-on-1 help with homework. In many households, parents are not able to provide that help due to work schedule or their own lack of education. Depending on homework seems to disproportionally affect children living in poor, uneducated households. Those children grow up less educated and end up with a lower paying job, so when they have children of their own, the cycle continues.
A great example of this is the very debate over "the core curriculum". The debate's loudest voices are from parents that just don't understand what the new methods are trying to accomplish. The 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.
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.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I don't think everyone agrees that students need more of their shitty education. Honestly, if you can't teach it in ten months, you can't teach it in eleven months either. Poor educational results are a thing of standards, not lack of time.
Despite possibly being a remnant of an agrarian past, you have to look at what's more useful. As countries that favor creative thinkers over merely competent automatons, education during summer vacation may be more effective than a month of extra school.
Mind you, sitting at home playing PS4 is a terrible way to spend summer vacation. Travel, organizing and playing real-world games, exploring, hell, building a trebuchet or something, these are all educational, and can't really be done in school.
I work in a school but am not part of the teacher's union. Teachers, and their unions, are like doctors, lawyers, hackers, and all other walks of life--some are good, some are bad, but most are somewhere in between. In the end, though, they want to get paid like anyone else. Teachers get summers off, all student breaks, snow days, and some personal time. When I read the article and see they'll be getting an extra 4k a year I can't help but cringe. Is this really about what's best for the kids, or is it the teacher's union getting a bit more money for the teachers? Again, I'm not part of that union, so maybe I'm just a spiteful jerk who has to be at work while teachers are enjoying summer break and whining about not making enough.
In my experience a long schedule in software programming is counter productive. Sometimes you are better off going for a jog and then getting back to programming gets you back on track but other times it really doesn't work and the more you try to solve the problem the less evident it becomes. Eventually you wake up in the morning and you know how to fix it. But you can't force the creative process.
I'm certified to teach K-5 in one of the US states but currently teach in another country. I've looked into this idea quite a bit.
There is evidence to show that extra school time benefits children in families that don't give much academic support at home (especially prevalent in poor, inner-city neighborhoods). For example, standardized test scores in reading often rise after summer vacations in affluent areas, but not so much in poor areas. The assumption is that many affluent parents tend to read and encourage their children to read during the summer. It's simply a disparity of time reading. To combat this, some experimental, inner-city schools have had success raising scores with very long days. However, I haven't seen anything showing that longer days help elsewhere. Homework (no matter how many hours) has been shown to have no significant effect raising scores for elementary students. (Up to 2 hours helps high school students, but over that seems to give no additional benefit.)
Honestly, I would first look at reducing time giving children tests. In many schools, children are given about an hour of tests a day, on average (amount varying from day to day, class to class, school to school). Tests are specifically to help adults (administrators, teachers, parents). Children are not allowed to practice their weak areas (the main thing that helps them learn) during a test. Although tests give children goals to strive for, motivational goals can be given many other, more effective ways. That's often 180 hours of test time a year (36 days of school, considering 5 hours a day of "in-class" time).
In my school we give 1 standardized test a year, and no testing outside that. Our scores are usually average or better than average on the standardized test (despite having many special-needs students). The teachers have more time to work with the students (and therefore know exactly where each child is). We also have more time to plan (instead of correcting tests during prep time).
Common questions we get are about how we communicate a child's level, without grades (given from tests). Simply put, we give more in-depth reports to parents & other schools. It works, but this is the part that scares most administrators and parents. Frankly, this part is more work for the adults. But if the main focus is on what's best for the children, frequent testing should be abolished. From the perspective of a child's education (practicing difficulties and learning new things), testing is one of the least efficient uses of time. And if we truly want more class time, that's where educators should start.
These new school hours are awful. The high school youth need a far longer school day. Programs and services for students have been cut supposedly for economic reasons. They cut the hours as they cut the programs. Students have no worse enemy than their families and neighbors. Getting high school kids absent from their homes is a positive goal. My high school day consisted of getting up at 6am and eating, driving 15 miles to school and being in place at 7:20 am.. The day ended at 3:20 pm. but was far from over. One night a week we had concert band practice or marching band practice from 7 PM unril 10 pm. We also had either a marching event or a concert event about one night a week and sometimes traveled for a weekend for regional contests and the like. Band students tended to go to college and had grades and health reports superior to the school population. That is despite the fact that many of us would be forced to study all night and be on our feet for two days running at times. Musical training and phys-ed are both vital programs that every student should be involved in. And guess what programs got cut the most!
PE classes have at best a very poor correlation with exercise, and an even weaker relation to the sorts of physical activities that help the brain. They are poorly thought out, and have as their primary result the development of hatred and fear of gym teachers among the weaker students.
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Individuals are ... individual. Some people can and should be introduced to mathematics quite early. Math is the foundation of science and engineering, and one effective method for crippling a nation's technological future is withholding math from the young.
I would argue that there is no "too young" to promote numerical understanding for anyone. Understanding numbers is essential to understanding the world, and the sooner that understanding starts, the better.
Piaget responded to criticism by acknowledging that the vast majority of critics did not understand the outcomes he wished to obtain from his research (wikipedia). If that doesn't indicate a "the facts be damned" sort of dishonesty, I don't know what does.
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A great deal depends upon how much you like what you're doing. One summer job of assembly line labor left me refreshed at the end of each day. The last job I had, designing integrated circuits, had me working 60 hours a week just because I could.
Some of the great advances are the result of people obsessed with their work.
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