More school is a waste of time
I am baffled that people would suggest the problem with school in America is that we don’t have long enough days or that the school year is too short. I learned from a very young age that if something isn’t working, I shouldn’t continue doing it. If students are disengaged and bored with 180 days of school, what does adding another 10-20 days of boring, disengaged schooling do to enhance education? More of a bad thing is WORSE. If what you are doing in a given period of time is not working, YOU SHOULDN’T ADD MORE TIME! You should restructure what you are doing in that time.
Show me a classroom where students are engaged for 50 minutes, then yes, I will agree that those students could get a better education if they had that same engagement for another 10 minutes. However, I wonder how many principals are walking around their buildings, observing the teaching and learning that is occurring (or NOT occurring), and are thinking to themselves “Man, we just need to make this longer. All those students who are passing notes and failing classes, we need to keep them in their desks a little longer. That will solve our problem.”
Wake up people. If your system is broken, putting your “product” (the student) in the system longer won’t make it better. A flat tire doesn’t improve by riding on it longer. A broken computer screen doesn’t get better by looking at it longer. A broken furnace doesn’t heat the house no matter how long you wait.
The problem with school in America is not a lack of time. Look at what is done in some AP classes. An AP Calc teacher will usually get more done in 50 minutes than most classes get done in a week. Furthermore, there is a point in which adding more of an input actually produces LESS of an output. Running for 3 hours everyday is not better than running for 1 hour everyday. I deal with many teenagers, and I am not convinced that subjecting them to more hours of sitting in desks and taking notes is really what they need. I am a huge supporter of life-long learning, but I am not a huge supporter of life-long school.
You can squander time just as easily as you can squander money, and there is a dismal amount of “time-squandering” that occurs in our schools. Lottery winners go broke because they don’t know how to manage money, and schools go broke because they don’t know how to manage time. 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. But if you are flat broke and you let years and years of education go down the drain and have a 25% graduation rate, you do not need an extension of time. You need to figure out why you are able to have students for 9 hours a day, 5 days a week, and you can only get 25% of them to graduate.
Until you have engaged learning (and for the majority of high school classrooms, this has yet to occur), adding more time doesn’t fix the problem. It won’t reform schooling. It will just make it a longer, more boring process for everyone involved. And that is the last thing that we need in schools.
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couldn't agree more. Longer
couldn't agree more. Longer periods of uninteresting & disengaged learning does nothing. It's why I hate the busy work & pointless exercises that Corporate America dishes out (for example) because it really doesn't get any "real" work done, it just kills time. And killing time isn't what I'd like to get paid for. The same can be said for our learning system. Perhaps a lot of it is just finding a way to kill time during the allotted class period...BARF.
Deep Truths
You are touching on some very deep truths here, particularly the relationship between the school environment and corporate America. The parallels between the two are downright scary. I have been wanting to post on this subject for a long time, but your comment has provided extra motivation. "Perhaps a lot of it is just finding a way to kill time during the allotted class period" Is this one of the most valuable skills that students learn in school? Sometimes I can't help but wonder if it is.
But what if it's not boring...
It sounds like you are assuming that the schools are boring. So what about those high schools that are trying to "catch" kids up because they are so far behind, are doing it in an interesting way with the kids engaged (mostly) and are still lagging behind? Having taught both, AP Calculus is easy to cover a lot in a 50 minute period with students that are motivated and good at math versus those that come into freshmen year taking pre-algebra, beaten down from years of failure.
Jaime Escalante is well-known for his ability to reinvigorate the East LA Calculus scene through the use of extra time (in addition to many other elements). I doubt he would tell anyone that he would've gotten seen the same results by not making students come year-round.
I don't think it's an answer, but it's not something that shouldn't be utilized in cases.
False correlation
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.
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