First off this is not about Obama, this is about the possible advantages and disadvantages, good and bad, of having much shorter Summer breaks for kids in the US as well as possible school the entire afternoon instead of half of it.
Some kids are already not liking it, they would want to spend late afternoon playing with their friends instead of being in school till dinner. Now during the Winter, that means on a nice day it would mean they’re in school for nearly every minute of daylight, then there’s severely shortened summer breaks which would mean more days they are in school instead of at the pool or on vacation. I’m not certain of the opinion of the teachers though.
Here’s what I think, upgrade the teachers, and add more disciplinary action.
I am in the top high school in my district, and I have had teachers who were awesome and made the kids want to work hard. In that class we were able to get through every chapter in our book, so what would extra school time mean? We can’t really go beyond the end. If all teachers were like the one I had, we wouldn’t be in the lower tier of intellect in the modern world. Well, unless kids started to skip out.
That brings me to my next suggestion.
By the time kids reach the middle of middle school, bleh I know, instead of school security enforcing them, the city police give them disciplinary action. Instead of the usual 1st time is a warning for truancy(LAME!), it should be a house arrest. Then custom jail, where the kids will be forced to get adequate grades to leave, of which they will be placed under house arrest equal to the amount of truancies or mishaps. Adequate as in a C+ or higher. I know kids, I am one, and I know if they try they can get at least that. Plus, getting high and doing drugs and sex would severely go down. Then it will be a two way choice for them, get clever and streetwise, or get clean. That way, we will have those people who can get by using social connections,and those who will work hard.
And I haven’t forgotten about artists, they will be able to get specialization classes such as programming or IT to back up on if the art doesn’t go so well.
Yeah, it sounds a bit of a dick move, but, who knows, it could work.
If they’re discussing (hypothetically) increasing the number of hours kids are in school to try and improve their education, I think that’s the wrong approach given the current situation. The average U.S. kid today needs a better education, not more education.
Instead of adding more hours schools need to be focusing on maximizing the hours that they already have, by teaching better. Schools need to provide better teachers and a better learning environment for kids. On the other side, there is a huge lack of personal accountability in many students and their parents. Students should want to go to school and get good grades. Parents should try to provide an environment such that when kids go to school, they are ready to learn.
It is my understanding that kids in Japan and China spend more hours in school (and have shorter breaks) than kids in the U.S. While I’m not saying that’s a good or bad thing, my opinion is that the U.S. school system should only increase the amount of time that students spend in school when it is unable to teach more in the time alloted. At the moment, we are far from that point – just look at the difference between pubic and private high schools.
We need more involved parents. More school won’t help if the kid doesn’t care. Parents need to be there to punish/reward their children. I’ve seen far too many disciplinary problems that would have been solved if the parents were more involved. Kids in my middle school would get in fights to get suspended. Who doesn’t like a week off of school?
We really need to change how we fund schools. I know that the current system wants to make sure all kids get a quality education, but we can’t baby them. If they don’t want to do the work, then leave them behind. A lot of the schools in my area are having trouble because the kids barely do the work required. When you constantly lower the standards in an effort to make it easier for kids to pass, not only do you hurt the advanced kids, but the ones who don’t want to do any work do even less.
I know it may sound bad to leave kids behind but I don’t know that there is anything else that we can do. Kids who just squeak by in school seem to do the same for the rest of their lives. America needs to get its motivation back or the rest of the world will leave us behind.
Although this may be important at younger ages, I think the key problem is American high schools today is actually the inferior education that has become the norm. If we were to step it up I think children would be less annoyed with school.
Kids should be given more time, not less, to be kids, to playfully explore the world and their interests, instead of being force fed stuff that might or might not help them later. They should be given the opportunity to find out individually what motivates them, what stirs their passion, not suffocated with yet more of that one-size-fits-all education.
See, I think Obama ain’t the worst president last decennia, but he’s making a HUGE mistake. When a school, which only teaches 800 hours a year, made 98% of her students pass their finals, it’s being called an effective school (in business life at any case). So Obama supports ineffective schools? I think their are some things higher at the priority list.
More hours doesn’t mean the students will learn more.
I’m not sure about down there but up here in Canada I found that choosing my career was relatively easy because I had plenty of choice into what I could explore because I had chosen what I liked and didn’t like.
From what I think, teaching kids general concepts allows them to choose what they like and don’t like so further down the road they say, hey I liked that kind of math so I’ll take that course, choose that career, etc. If you don’t force them to learn anything they won’t do anything for the rest of their lives.
This opinion might be a little biased because as a kid in the public educatino system, I loved going to school. I had a thirst for knowledge, and I know that not all (probably most) do not.
The root of the problem is that our schools work in such a way that most kids start to hate learning. Better teachers, better curriculum, better teaching methods, etc., are the only way to solve the education problem. As long as kids “hate school” they’re not going to learn as much.
In general some kids hate school and the hate spreads to greater things like talking politics and religion in the forums. When kids learn not to hate, shenigans on the forums stop. Hence, from now on, kids should be taught not hate at school. Except trolls on the forum who ought to be stamped out, and driven from any forums with pitchforks never ever to returns.
A good lesson for all!
My mother has subbed for many teachers at elementary schools in my district before and she knows first hand of the problems. She notices the problems are in part with the study habits of the kids and the fact many kids aren’t motivated to learn.
This may sound like a “blame the kids” thing, but it would help to help them improve their study habits and find ways to make them more motivated to learn without totally scaring them into doing it, you combine that with better quality teaching material and encouraging more parents to be more involved in child education and we could really see good results.
Usually, preschool-kids are highly motivated to learn.
The demotivation most commonly comes from one of two things: Either the parents expect their children to do best (A+ is minimum!!), or teachers teach too dry, which leads to uninterested pupils, which leads to bad works, which leads to frustrated teachers, which leads to even drier education…
Though, neither parents nor teachers are directly guilty.
Many teachers should rather have taken a different job route, which might actually be payed better, even. Or they should learn about psychology - not the theory but actually applying it.
What leads parents to their faults usually is fear. Fear that their offsprings might fail to survive in a more and more complicated world.
Though, if you “just” (of course it’s not all that easy) were canalising the interests of a child instead of canceling them and try to force different interests (which is extremely frustrating), things would look totally different…
What you’d need to do is, you should at least try to find a connection between the “what I want to know” and the “what I must learn at school”. If that’s done, things probably clear up. But it’s not quite the easiest route…
Hmmm. Just finished reading some of the comments here.
Firstly, I’m an American sophomore student. I go to a crappy public school where most everyone tries to act stupid just to fit in to the majority. I spend 7.5 miserable hours there every day. I feel I may be learning one or two things every week or so, but other than that, it’s just tests and reviews on stuff that I’ve mostly just picked up on my own. More time in school would, for one thing, take away from the time I spend on my interests. Interests that at some point I hope to develop into a career. More time at school would only be working towards the same substandard goals that the government sets for every public school kid. The goals that I set for myself aren’t being reached by the subjects I learn at school. I’m all for being a well rounded, well educated person, but I feel like I could be getting that done in half the time, not twice.
