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Dear Anonymous,

You raise some excellent points. Yes, I do think that if you have mostly engaged learning (and I'm not just talking about "people having fun"), then adding time can be a benefit. As I mentioned in my post "If you have been a good steward of your time as a teacher or a school, then I am ready to listen to your proposal for more time."

I think Escalante is a good example of this. The only thing I know about him is from the movie, but in the movie, he doesn't start out by teaching AP Calculus for 4 hours a day. It takes time for him to develop the motivation, and for the students to trust him, before he can pull off the incredible amount of teaching and learning that occured. In the specific case of remediation, the addition of time is almost always a necessity. But my problem is with people who make the false correlation between increasing time and therefore increasing student learning. It is false to say, "Since Jaime Escalante (or any other remediation program) added time and got better results, I too can simply add time to my class and get better results." This is a false correlation. Simply adding more time to a failing system will not produce the desired results. In the case of remediation, adding time will only benefit if the initial time is being used effectively. I think that in many cases (and in some of my first attempts at remediation), time is focused on excessively.

Also, I take issue with the idea that we need to lengthen the school days or school year as a quick and simple way to get better results. This is a false understanding of the relationship between "time" and "results". It is how you manage your time, not how much time you spend, that has the greatest impact on "results".

You are correct in stating that I am assuming, in general, that school is boring. For my 16+ years of school, I was bored. I think that, for the majority of people, they would say school was, for the most part, boring. Why is it so easy to remember my favorite teachers? Because there just aren't many classes that stick out as classes where I learned alot. It is easy to see a candle in the darkness, and in general, "school" is pretty dark and boring on average. This is not to say that there are not schools or teachers who are an exception to this average, but I think we have the national test scores and general classroom apathy to prove my hypothesis that school is boring. (See my blog post at http://www.tonysclassroom.com/dp/node/42 to read about what I think learning can look like. I don't think students need to have big smiley faces as an indicator for learning!)

In closing, I would say that we seem in agreement. We both think that adding time can be a good way to increase efficacy and student learning. I just want to encourage people to avoid the immediate (yet false) correlation that increasing time will increase "results", The first thought should be how to organize the time already given, and when this is being used effectively, then adding more time can be the next step.