1. Year-round schooling: The concept is simple - one quarter of school followed by a three week recess. Essentially you get a three week break every season of the year. I think this is FABULOUS. A LOT of schools in North Carolina have year round programs and have since I was in elementary school. I think there are a number of pros to this: definitely less time in the summer for students to lose knowledge, cheap vacations when my kids get old enough (it is super cheap to go to Disney in October!), and especially FOUR breathers a year instead of one long one during the summer. Let's face it, our summer break is fantastic, but about halfway through I get bored and by the end of the summer I'm so into being bored all the time that I am completely unmotivated to go back to work. On the other hand, child care for working parents would be a nightmare with year-round schools. I pity the parents who would have to find day care for three weeks at a time, four times a year. Yikes! Also, where are we going to get the funding to put air conditioning in every school that doesn't have it (which are A LOT of schools around here)? No way can we go to school without air conditioning during the summer. Hmm...
2. A longer school day: I've heard this. I happen to work in a district where our school day is already shorter than most in the area, so there has been talk of lengthening our school day next year anyway. BUT the woman at our inservice today mentioned attending school from 9-5. WHAT?! My second graders shut down by about 1:30 and are completely unfocused and ready to go home by that point in the day. How in the WORLD am I going to keep them focused until 5:00? This seems a bit unreasonable to me, especially if we will be going to school year-round. But I don't make the decisions (though I often think I should).
I have a feeling there ARE going to be big changes in the world of education. God knows Bush screwed it up enough, we're going to have to do something to make up for what he did. Not sure if these are the answers. Not sure if these are even Obama's actual idea of answers either. Maybe just the opinion of our presenter today. But I think she might be onto something. What do you think?
1 comment:
Noooooooo to both! I love my nice long summer, probably more than most teachers since Wes is home also. I love knowing that I will have almost 3 months with my girls to do all kinds of fun things each year. I do agree the kids lose a lot of what they learned over the summer so in that aspect it would help but still.......
The longer days sound horrible as well! I completely agree that there is no way a 2nd grader will make it to 5:00. Let's hope this lady was just speculating and doesn't know what she was talking about.
Post a Comment