I know this is typical for the US so this is more for US people to respond to. I wouldn’t say that it is the best system for work, just wondering about the disconnect.
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Unfortunately, nowadays, the schools fail at both
America moment
It’s interesting how different the quality of schooltime can be, and how perception of said time can differ for school kids as well. I was in a “full day” school starting from age 9 in a country where regular schools end at lunch time. Our school had the same curriculum to go through as every other, but lots more time to do it. The extra time was filled with dedicated self-learn time ( basically to do homework, but you have your classmates around to talk and help each other and can reach out to teachers if you really struggle with something) and elective extracurricular activities. It was mandatory, but you had free choice between all the offers. Teachers had to offer something, and usually offered their personal passion activities/hobbies. This led to these activities being the highlight of every kid’s week, because there was enough variety to choose from to find something you liked. Kinda like club activities in US schools, but much less codified and without competitive objectives. Some examples are photography, pottery, soap box car building, school beautification ( we literally were allowed and encouraged to graffiti/mural the school walls :D ), gardening, natural science ( basically constantly doing fun physics and chemistry experiments without boring theory), electronics etc. . This was intentionally kept separate from sports or music, which also were partially elective: you had to do sports and music, and some basics were mandatory for all, but you could opt for specializations. All this semi-forced mingling served well to prevent the formation of strong clique boundaries, without inhibiting kids from pursuing their talents and passions.
All that had huge advantages. Kids from troubled families had a much easier time of keeping up with everyone else, as help from home was hardly necessary. Lunch was provided by the school. Wasn’t stellar, wasn’t horrible. But it was available to all students for free, and that can be very important to some as well. It took me a long time, often only after visiting school friends for the first time or even after schooltime was over entirely, to realize how crazy rich or poor some of my friends’ families actually were, or what difficulties they sometimes faced at home and that there was a reason we never were invited to visit them. At school, it simply didn’t matter to us. Sure, some wore more brand clothes than others, but nobody thought of using this as a measure of personal quality. Class cohesion also was usually strong. Sure, kids still were assholes and bullies like everywhere else, but it usually got solved internally quickly, because it was harder to keep it up for full days with plenty of “forced” social time, and you ended up being more confronted with the damage and hurt you caused. And in really bad cases the proximity to school made it much easier for teachers to pick up on any developments in their students and classes and react quickly. There also were some mandatory “social skill” classes to teach everyone basic conflict solving and mediating. It was only one or two sessions per year, but I think it actually helped, even if we kids usually scoffed at it at the time. It was very clear the school philosophy was not to push through a curriculum, but to use the extra time to help explore and form personalities that later will hopefully enmesh well in society. And yes, our school had a bit more teaching personnel than other schools to fill all the time slots and extra activities, but we still had 25-35 students per class, it was not some utopian dream.
We kids loved the full day spent at school as well. No homework, and what’s better than spending the entire day with your friends? The school was far from my home, so I left the house at 6:30 and usually got back around 18:00, with about 40min of train commute plus 30min of walking (one way). Only Friday ended at lunch. Still never felt that I was lacking “me” time.
Tl;Dr : It matters a lot how the time at school is used.
Because even I don’t want to work 9-5.
(Also, when are teachers supposed to do things like grade work, or kids to have extracurricular activities, 9-5 is draining, add in music or sports and there’s nothing left)
This was my first thought. Teachers definitely need time to assess outside of class time. I would think that assessment or grading would happen while they aren’t teaching. There should be a system where teachers grade outside of teaching time or during “homework/study hall” time. You would teach math for 6 hours and grade math for 2 or some breakdown that makes sense. I don’t want to make teachers work anymore than they already do. The current system doesn’t seem to respect them either way.
Also, why do teacher need to do all the grading?
Who do you propose else does it? Teachers know their students and can learn from tests etc and help them do better. additionally to the original argument, it’s not just grading that teachers have to do as well, also lesson/course planning, setup for lessons (eg slideshow/lab/printing). There’s just a lot for teachers to do outside of the classroom.
Well most universities have TAs that either just do all grading, assist with grading, or help with lesson plans and it seems to work okay.
In an ideal system, there isn’t a reason that grade school teacher couldn’t have a TA that is also present in the class and familiar with the students.
Well you would have to hire someone to do that, and it’s my understanding that teachers are mostly underpaid and understaffed, so to at a minimum double the number of teachers would be excessively costly, to the point where even imagining it is laughable.
Not that I don’t like the idea, it’s just not feasible.
See: “In an ideal system”
This whole discussion is complete fantasy to begin with since changing the fundamental scheduling of the public education system would require a complete overhaul anyway.
Well, you assess knowledge by using simplified electronic quizzes to take the busy work out of it, then dive into the “show your work” for those students who are struggling. And students who have mastered the material can work with those who are struggling and serve as a force multiplier. Tutoring others makes them even better students, and those tutored will have more 1:1 time than they could possibly get with a teacher.
Khan Academy has been working with schools in the Bay Area for more than a decade and the results are pretty astounding. Salman Khan’s TED Talk in 2011 is an exciting glimpse of the possible, and by all accounts those who use Khan Academy software and methods are reaping the benefits.
Can you tell me more about how Khan Academy have worked with schools in the Bay Area? I just finished uni and now have my teaching degree. I work in Sweden but I would like to read more about this.
I just know what Salman Khan has said about it – watch his videos for more.
Clearly you and I participated in very different school experiences. In highschool, I got on my bus each day at 7:30 and got back off the bus at 16:00. If you subtract the 30 minute lunch period, that adds up to almost exactly 8 hours each day.
Factoring in the 2 hours of homework that was regularly assigned, I actually have substantially more free-time as a working 9-5 adult (my school did not have “study hall” time). A young me would have done unspeakable things for a chance at abolishing homework!
It isn’t even just grading work. In my high school classroom I have students ranging from a second grade reading level to post grad. Every reading, worksheet, science lab, project needs to have accommodations and modifications written in to encompass that. That takes time.
Or creating a new lesson. Making a new lesson for a 50 minute period takes at least an hour.
Just because students are at school does not mean they are in a typical class. Our school has athletics right after classes. We got out about 5. Just make other options, perhaps skills, clubs, study hall, etc.
Now I have been outa school since 2008, but back then, in public school, they didn’t teach us shit. Like actual useful things. How to deal with emotions, personal finance, How to deal with police, mindfulness, critical thinking…nothing. all busy work and history through the American lense (propaganda). I even had a science teacher who was super religious and said earth was created 6000 years ago…it was geology ffs. Math was the worst imo. Solve for X, zero context. The only reasoning they gave to learn it was “to get in to college”.
Safe to say I didn’t go to college.
If you didn’t learn that stuff, that’s on your parents, not your teachers. They’re not there to raise you.
Not all parents are equal. It’d be cool if we valued our young, regardless of from whom they came from. Nobody gets to decide whether to be born or not, but they’re still forced to accept the terms of service.
Maybe we should try to value… people?.. in general? But who honestly gives a fuck, I got too much on my own plate to really think about it anyway
That’s why they’re all entitled to a free education in most modern democracies.
Unfortunately not all parents are equal, that’s true. But there’s not much that can be done about that which child protection agencies don’t already cover.
Teachers can’t raise their students.
I agree that teachers can’t/shouldn’t have to raise students, and I believe most teachers would agree. But it ends up happening all of the time because a lot of people want to help as best they can. The teachers who do go the extra mile(s) shouldn’t have to be put in that situation to begin with. And the teachers who do their job well and nothing else, shouldn’t be shamed. It’s a societal problem that doesn’t have to be… but we’d rather blame “work ethic” and “this new generation”, than invest in the underlying issues. And that same rhetoric has been happening for probably over a century (at the very least)
Saying “CPS already covers what we can’t really change” is a farcry from actuality. Do you think social work is a prestigious position? If you do, are they funded and compensated appropriately? If people are just “popping babies out of their vagina” and expecting help to raise them; why do we work so hard to undermine the autonomy of a woman’s choice to give birth in the first place? And if “every life matters” (so very much) to those who oppose choice… why aren’t we helping the families who aren’t allowed to choose because of some bullshit beliefs/laws that have nothing to do with an observed reality? Hypocrisy all over the damn place.
It’s a control and power struggle that has been going on for longer than we’ve been alive. We can have rational thought AND compassion at the same time; but many of those who influence our “laws” don’t give a damn about what happens to poeple after their own ends or objectives have been met.
If we don’t believe teachers are responsible for raising kids, than we better damn-well make sure we are providing our own with the resources they need. Or fuck it, let’s keep passing the blame in order to make ourselves feel righteous and forget about the very complex issues. Complexities are hard anyway, why bother when I’m already comfortable?
Those are US problems. I don’t live in the US
Those are absolutely not problems specific to the US. But it looks like you’re not trying to understand any viewpoint other than your own. Good day sir
Lol your world view is so American that you can’t see the forest for the trees. Indeed it seems you’re the one who doesn’t understand any other viewpoint, because you don’t even understand that there are other viewpoints to be had.
Yeah, it’s not like they are part of an institution designed to ensure a baseline level of education within society. Oh, wait.
That’s right, to educate you, not to raise you.
A basic level of education to function at work. That’s literally why modern schooling was created during the industrial revolution.
What the fuck do you think parents are supposed to do? Just pop you out of a vagina, feed you, and leave everything else to other people?
I’m sorry your parents were so shit, anon.
How to deal with emotions, personal finance, How to deal with police, mindfulness, critical thinking…nothing.
All of that seems fairly important for continued success at work.
What the fuck do you think parents are supposed to do? Just pop you out of a vagina, feed you, and leave everything else to other people?
Unfortunately, much to my dismay, being a parent has no requirements or standards. As such, in order to ensure a baseline, that should be available in school. In addition, how are those parents supposed to learn how to parent… if that isn’t taught in school?
Fuck orphans?
Cute, but complete crap.
Ah yes, I can’t believe I didn’t look at it that way. What wonderous intelligence you have been blessed with.
It means that you’re being deliberately obtuse in order to pretend that you don’t understand that you’re wrong. If you don’t understand how to admit that, it’s nobody else’s problem.
Some people don’t have parents. But I generally agree with you.
You had me until math. I used algebra every day of my blue collar life. Fun fact, the more math that you know directly correlates to your income more than any other subject.
Friendly reminder that correlation does not equal causation.
Intelligence is the most likely mediator between those two variables. Intelligent people can grasp mathematical concepts easier and are more likely to use it, and intelligent people tend to shoot for higher paying jobs that challenge them.
I use math everyday as well in the trades. Not too complex math, but my point was not the math itself, rather the way it was taught to me and the context given, which was none. I’m definitely not saying don’t teach math, quite the opposite. I’m a hands on learner. Math for the sake of math to 15 yr old me seemed like an empty exercise. If I could do it again, I’d probably be good at it. But that’s life.
Pure math is just too abstract to make sense. When a teacher says the only reason to learn it is to get in a college, yeah, that’s terrible teaching. A halfway decent teacher would at least orally give some RL examples people might need to use mental math, like calculating whether the 300g or the 500g packet is cheaper per gram
They did that a tiny bit in early math classes. In high school, none. I failed every year cause I didn’t care about what X is. I erased the problem. No more problem. I was a dumb kid with shit teachers. And here I am using math everyday and finding I’m fairly decent at mental math and weird fractions. Guess I’m a hand on learner. I dunno. I agree with you.
If you have to deal with police you SHUT THE FUCK UP. You can’t beat them at their own game
Which should be taught, imo. police are not your friends. They arrest you for profit. I learned how to deal the hard way. But least I know now. I guess teaching it would be counter to the whole reason of policing so yea. 🤷
When would the teachers have time to lesson plan or grade if they’re teaching kids 8 hours a day?
Just because students are at school from 9 to 5 doesn’t mean every single teacher has to be in front of a class from 9 to 5.
I mean, nationwide teacher shortage, overfilled classrooms… If the kids are there then all the teachers are working the whole time.
The same time they use now?.. in their free time. But like, still for free.
Because they care so much, time/money means nothing to them. Otherwise, they shouldn’t be educators to begin with, because they obviously don’t care about the children. Who here is even thinking about the children?!
People on the internet have gotten so stupid, I’m not entirely sure whether this was meant as /s or not. Really an indictment on the internet as a whole.
I feel that viscerally, so I wanted to confirm that I was being sarcastic. The, “Who here is even thinking about the children?!” was my attempt at /s without actually putting it. But I don’t blame you for having doubts lol
While the kids are doing whatever they used to call homework in class. Split classes between teachers: one supervises while one works.
You don’t manage a lot of kids, do you?
If they did, we wouldn’t have had to read that.
Or If they do… they absolutely shouldn’t
It’s literally what they do in my wife’s class where they have 24 each but hey what would I know
“My wife’s a primary school teacher so I know enough to solve education issues”
Here is a functional solution you want to ignore because you look down on primary school teachers
“Functional” does not equal “practical”, nor does it even remotely equate to “looking down on primary school teachers”
Let’s go ahead and ignore every other “functional solution” because it’s too (insert excuse) to work.
What we’re currently doing in the US works so well, it’s why we lead the world in education… I think. Idk, I never learned any nuance besides standardized tests. But I’m ok, teachers and kids are just lazy
You might want to look up the educational standards for lower grades to HS.
It is better at the college level, though.
No its because I am a teacher and you have no idea what you’re talking about
18 hours to think that up? Yeah, you’re not a teacher.
So are you asking for twice as many teachers or twice as many kids per teacher?
The struggle to hire teachers is already high and the GOP is trying to put as many obstacles as possible to slowly strangle public schools and shift to charter/private schools.
I think there is some nefarious reasons for the current setup but here’s a point I didn’t see. People and children especially can’t learn for 8 hours straight learning needs to be broken up with play time or eating or socializing. Then reinforcement of what you learned earlier before you go to sleep can be helpful. Ideally I don’t think homework should be learning new subjects or really hard at all it should be a cake walk of whatever was learned during that day.
My high-school biology teacher suggested that we study during commercials with whatever our favorite 30 minute show is. She claimed it helps retention set in, and you will even link concepts to the show further assisting in information retention.
Sounds like a good teacher.
“Ideally I don’t think homework should be learning new subjects or really hard at all it should be a cake walk of whatever was learned during that day.”
As professional educators, that’s what many of us intend. In my case, many kids just don’t really practice the new stuff in class, so when they get home they think it’s new. I fixed that issue a few years ago, but it’s crazy what a hard time some kids have with pretty basic self-regulation. I don’t blame anyone in particular, it’s just tough.
School in the US is designed to indoctrinate kids to be slaves.
It’s too early for this
I think we have homework because it’s cheap.
It would benefit the kids much more if they had extracurricular activities, clubs, and workshops after lecture classes, where they could actually apply what they learn during lectures.
But that would be expensive & hurt businesses bottom lines via increased taxation.
I spent about 2 decades as a teacher. I felt pretty strongly that kids needed unstructured time outside of school to reflect on things, observe the world, whatever. I rarely gave homework, yet my students did about the same as the students who had different teachers (yeah, they use those standardized tests to judge teachers. Well, technically it was supposed to be to learn new skills in how to teach from teachers who excelled on certain topics.).
I got so many freaking complaints and questions about my policy. The parents just could not deal with their kids not having homework. I always thought that, for parents, homework demands were a lazy way to feel involved in what their kids were doing at school as well as sidestep having actual conversation and bonding with their kids.
Thank you for caring
Yeah, that’s kind of what I mean. I remember my shop class in middle school was one of my favorites, and I would have loved to just be able to stay there after school with someone making sure we were being safe, but otherwise letting us experiment & invent.
Working 9-to-5 is miserable. It only helps if the wolk you’re doing is interesting.
For a child, school is usually not ‘interesting’. Children shouldn’t be subjected to misery.
P.s. Props to you for saying you’re in the US, not just assuming it.
I’m not sure if adding more time in school would be helpful even if there’s no homework. I have a 9-5 job, and by 3:30 I’m already mentally checked out for the day, just watching the ole clock tick slowly to five. Not to mention that kids aren’t paid to go to school, so the kids wouldn’t see any tangible benefits of a longer day. In theory they would learn more, but most kids aren’t thinking that way and there’s only so much a kid can learn in one day anyway.
When I was in high school, they added 25 minutes to every day to build in snow days. If we did not use them, school just ended earlier than scheduled. This could serve basically the same function, to shorten the school year.
However, that’s not even necessarily a good thing for learning… I think year-round school is generally accepted to be the best way to learn having many shorter gaps rather than one long summer. I suppose it could build in an extra week or two of breaks normally not present in a year-round school schedule.
There are compelling reasons send them 9-5
There are also compelling reasons not to
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Teachers spend a non-trivial amount of time post class working on previous assignments, future assignments, setting up tests coordinating with other teachers and staff. If they start all this at 5, they’re stuck at the office until very late.
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Busses/kids on the road before rush hour
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Extra-curricular activities are better off earlier than later, don’t want clubs running into diner time.
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better chance of getting home before dark in winter at Northern latitudes
- We shouldn’t be forcing our children to spend the majority of their waking lives chained to a desk doing menial work mixed with some valuable education and instead allow them to actually be kids and be outside doing kid things.
I’m a private teacher and I see so many kids who are like, I am in school from 8-3:30, then from 3:50-5 I’m in softball, then I’m in a study group from 5:30-7. I go to bed at 9.
Kids aren’t allowed to be kids much of the time anymore. Most everything seems to be in the duality of either “Glued to their devices” or “Endless cycle of extracurricular and studying”
I absolutely refused to do homework back in the day. I had one math teacher that took your median grade and used that as the final grade. I would calculate to the assignment what it took to get an a, and do that much homework between arriving to class and the time she checked homework in.
I would always rush to complete my assignments early in other classes do any homework that I could get done before class change. I always aced my tests.
I think the worst was when the teacher would assign us to read ahead of chapter for the next days lesson. Yeah so you want me to be miserable tonight, and double bored tomorrow.
I also hated that the teachers never communicated. They would unintentionally group-assign hours of workload in non-GT classes.
Better chance of getting home before dark in winter at Northern latitudes.
Cries in living at 62o north
What if all the honework in the future is done online and multiple choice… if its a written asignment it can be graded by an AI. Bada bing teachers have not much more to complain about. If you are a teacher and are still complaining about having to grade homework, its probably because your administration is stuck in 2007.
A better argument would be, is homework worth it? Once AI has significantly advanced to be trustworthy enough to grade, it will be trustworthy enough to do the homework.
Want to be forward facing? How long before AI replaces teachers? What if classes were solely presented as video feeds. At any point you can raise your hand, It would stop the video feed. You ask the AI question. It formulates a response and then tests you to make sure that you understand the answer before moving on.
Imagine getting the equivalent of one-on-one tutoring in every subject.
What if instead of milestone tests the AI just follows along and makes sure you understand what’s going on? What if the next day it does a quick recap on the previous days lesson and asks you a couple of questions to make sure you get it?
What happens when each individual learns at their own pace and goes as fast or as slow as they need to. What happens when you can just walk away from a lesson and come back later?
Edit: I just cleaned up some text from voice dictation.
There are a couple of flaws with this. I spend a great deal of time structuring lessons to get students working with each other. I have met, and taught, too many people who have said that the only reason they stuck out through high school was the relationships they developed with thier peers and staff. We’ve seen what happens when students only do solo computer work, and it isn’t pretty.
There’s no requirement to be socially ostracized. You can still have groups, clubs, online and offline connections.
I suspect most students will likely find they have more spare/social time. When they can learn at their own pace with individual attention.
You may find that less kids feel like they are toughing it out, under these scenarios.
I use the Modern Classroom Model for my classroom for the last couple of years which is a self-paced system. In 2020 during our zoom school year I was also fully self paced. Here are a few things I’ve found.
A handful of students will shut down with self-paced learning. They have low self-efficacy and are failure avoidant.
Another handful of students will hand off their chromebook to “the smart kid” in a different class and have them take the mastery checks for them. They will end up bombing the mastery assessment, but teenagers are not known for their executive function.
A different handful have limited capacity for additional cognitive load. It is hard to do school when you don’t know where you are sleeping that night or some other chronic trauma. They thrive when being told explicitly what to do, how to do it.
Yet another handful will fly through the curriculum because they long ago figured out the game of school. Yet when I check in and ask deep, meaningful questions to see if they really understand the topic, they can’t.Young gen Z and gen alpha really need to work on social skills and work ethic. Solo-self-paced experiences don’t cover it.
I disagree on the work ethic point, but that could be its own whole rant about how the concept of “work ethic” is fundamentally flawed in a society where many jobs simply aren’t fulfilling and are only done for the carrot on a stick of being able to buy food and a roof over your head.
But on everything else, I wholeheartedly agree as somebody who came to hate the school system but loves to learn. It’s not just a Gen Z and younger issue, though I imagine they have it even worse considering the pandemic. I think it’s a flaw in how the school system is designed. School focuses on solo work almost to the exclusion of collaboration, and life just doesn’t work that way. Society is a collaborative effort, and even working at a cubicle farm on a solo project, it’s not like you can’t talk to your fellow workers to help solve problems. Plus, the pass or fail mechanism of the grading system ends up punishing mistakes and either creates risk aversion outright, kids who don’t bother because they’ve failed so many times that they believe it’s not worth even trying, or those kids who do well without trying until they get to later grades and have no study habits, who then learn that if they’re not instantly good at something, then it’s not worth putting effort into because they don’t know how to be bad at something long enough to get good.
I’m certainly no teacher, but I think the issue is that the foundational framework of our current school system was designed to create workers who could be expected to work on a factory line. People who could be given a short and simple list of repetitive tasks to follow, without the need for collaboration or anything more mentally demanding. Add in that many school subjects (at least when I was in school 15-20 years ago) lack any real-world context to their purpose, just “learn this because you have to,” and I’m not surprised that kids also have no drive to dig deeper than a surface level understanding. I remember the mentality of “just remember it long enough to do the test, and then dump it for the next set of things you have to learn.” It got me through high school.
AI doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, let alone what somebody else doesn’t know.
“Understanding” is just something that AI can’t do. It doesn’t know what your words mean, or what it’s own word mean.
AI is nowhere near good enough to be trusted with grading written assignments, and won’t be for a very long time.
AI isn’t good enough to grade written responses. If your referring to chat gtp and the like, they meant to be factual. Also online multiple choice homework can suck awfully depending on the course; physics comes to mind in this scenario since it requires an answer with precision and matching units to mark the homework as correct and that can make it really difficult to resolve and even if the teacher sets it up for partial credit if you get it right after attempts, if you can’t figure it out it is a 0. That physics homeaork destroyed and consumed my entire life lol
God I hope not I can’t stand ai grading an answer can be partially right or even wrong but cause interesting discussion from a human while badly implemented AI (which is what schools likily would have access to) will just give a percentage failure rate and move on.
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Instead of adopting the archaic 9-5, how about just eliminate homework?
How about we eliminate homework and switch to a 32 hour (or whatever) work week…
A lot of rural districts are going down to 4 day school days (although some are 10 hour days) in an attempt to attract teachers.
Not sure how well that is going for families, given that it’s difficult to have one parent at home when the kids are home an extra day.
As a teacher I 100% support this, it would be much better for teachers and students. It won’t happen though unless parents are also given a 4 day work week so they can look after their kids.
Because kids are too young to drink.
And the teachers aren’t supposed to.
My daughter has ADHD and sitting through six hours of school is hard enough of her. Eight would give her ridiculous amounts of stress and anxiety. Sure, one day she’ll have to build up to 8 hours when she gets a job, but she’s got to build up to it. Now eliminating homework (except maybe reading literature), I’m all for that.
At least with a job there is potential to find work that is mentally stimulating.
And working a job typically isn’t the same as school. School is for learning. That 6 hours where you need to be actively aware and absorbing information. Learning new things. Figuring out how those things fit into the real world. Recalling that information in stressful environments for tests. It’s mentally taxing for a lot of kids as is. When I was in school, most days I was mostly checked out by the end of that 6 hours. I can’t imagine adding a couple more hours in there. And then have to ride the bus home in rush hour traffic!
But now that I have that baseline education I can check out all day at work and still be more productive than a lot of those around me who stay engaged the full day. Give me eight hours. The most mentally taxing thing I have to do now is pretend to like some of my coworkers during meetings.
I don’t think school should emulate work.
Learning (well) isn’t easy, attention spans are limited and after some time you get rapidly diminishing results.
I personally like the sound of inverting the structure we use for learning, meaning assigning the “theory” as homework and using class time to discuss or apply it afterwards.
At least that has the benefit of letting every student manage their time, spending more time on harder (for them) subjects.
So what do you do when the kids don’t learn the theory for homework and so can’t do any of the work in class?
That’s where the discussion comes in. With an instructor to moderate and a class working together who will overall have grasped it. Those who didn’t pick it up reading learn by doing.
But personally, I don’t like the idea of kids doing schoolwork outside school hours. I went to a trade-school college and we would do trimesters with 9 weeks for a single class. Spent the whole day just in that class, six hours. First half learning theory then putting it into practice in the second half. By nine weeks, you’d know that subject pretty well. But that was complicated stuff, and honestly, probably didn’t even require 9 weeks. But it’s a good starting model. Fully immerse kids in a subject for weeks where they don’t have to mix in other subjects to muddy their forming brains. Homework won’t be needed and they’ll have a much better grasp on the subject at the end. You could do 6 classes for 6 weeks each a school year.
And I feel like early education kind of already does this. They typically will focus on a subject for weeks instead of trying to fit in 5 a day. It’s just the upper levels we’ve decided to shuffle kids around multiple times a day.
I like your enthusiasm and your heart is in the right place but it doesn’t translate on a practical level. I’m a teacher and an independant school in my town tried this, unfortunately didn’t work.
attention spans are limited and after some time you get rapidly diminishing results
Same is true in work, and why work weeks should be limited to 40 hours max. Americans work too much, and this is based on what Harvard says after studying it.
I personally like the sound of inverting the structure we use for learning, meaning assigning the “theory” as homework and using class time to discuss or apply it afterwards.
I like the idea, too. It has not been shown to have a meaningful positive effect up to now, as far as I know.
