(no subject)

[eirias]

Straight from the assmilliner: how we can solve all the education world's problems, including student learning difficulties and low teacher salaries, with nine hour school days.

*pause while I wait for the teachers in my audience to regain their composure*

Just once in this essay I would have liked to see him acknowledge that

A) students (and teachers!) have attention spans, and
B) when teachers ask for "a raise," they are not asking for "three extra hours of work each day, for which you will pay me the same lousy wages I already make."

It's a pretty old editorial that I stumbled upon while taking a break and reading WP archives; otherwise I would totally write to this guy and ask him, as politely as possible, if these things have crossed his mind.

Comments

[ksledgemoore.livejournal.com]

it's true that he didn't really address point (a), but he did seem to suggest that they'd pay the teachers more for those extra hours.

The bigger problem that I had with the article was that it was mainly saying that kids aren't going to college because they can't handle college, because they don't do any homework now. The thing is, structuring their time better by making them stay at school longer will possibly mean they will learn more, but they won't be learning discipline/time-management skills. Plus making school go until 5pm kind of wipes out the opportunity to do extra-curriculars. Personally I think this model prepares you for college even less. Imagine going from a 9 hour school day where everyone tells you what to do all of the time to going to a 3-4 hour school day where no one tells you what to do with your time, which is what you get in college!

Unfortunately I'm not advocating a solution because I can't come up with one. It is possible that the longer school day is better than any alternative I could think of.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I should have been clearer: when teachers complain about being paid too little, they don't just mean "in absolute dollars" -- they mean "proportional to the time worked." A "raise" that is exactly in proportion to the increase in hours worked is not actually a raise. That's like the difference between getting bumped from $9/hr to $10/hr at the Pizza Hut vs. getting bumped from a 40 to 60 hour workweek. Sure, you make more money, but you have even less time, and furthermore you are probably not making time and a half on hours worked over 40 per week like your colleagues at the Pizza Hut would, and a 9-hour school day guarantees you such extra hours even under work-to-rule.

In other words, I am really really mad that this guy is either so stupid or so disingenuous as to call that a "raise."

[ksledgemoore.livejournal.com]

I see. I had a feeling that's what you might have meant but I didn't totally understand because you said "the same awful pay" or whatever, which threw me off. Also, to prove your point further, the guy sort of suggested that schools that want to try this would have to do it by not paying the teachers first until people agree it's a good idea. That would of course mean YEARS of not paying people for their work...sounds insane to me.

Oh, and I didn't notice him call it a "raise" because you're right -- it DEFINITELY is not such a thing!!

[eirias.livejournal.com]

He didn't say "raise" in so many words, but it's strongly implied here:

One topic that comes up repeatedly in education articles and debates is the need for higher salaries and more job satisfaction to lure and keep the best teachers. Creating a longer school day can solve both of those problems. More hours can mean more money for the teacher, and more achievement for that teacher's students, which is just about all a good teacher needs to be happy.

Earlier in the article he notes that teachers at one school district with long hours got paid 7% more than teachers at a neighboring school district with a six hour day. He doesn't say exactly how long those long hours are, but just for comparison, the time increase he's asking for is a 50% increase. Yeah. That's actually a hefty per-hour decrease.

Oh, and not to mention -- "more achievement" from students is all teachers need to be happy? How about, you know, getting home before 9 pm? Hell, I'm not even a teacher and I could punch this guy for his saccharine moronitude.

I mean, it's not like it matters, because hopefully the people actually making policy decisions have at least a passing familiarity with the realities of education, something which seems to have escaped this professional education pundit. But the fact that there were probably some readers in the D.C. area who read this when it came out, stroking their chins, and thought "What a good idea!" -- it's just annoying. It feels like he's trying to exploit average people's ignorance of teacher's lives to win converts to his idea.

On general principle that annoys me, actually. I can't stand when people in positions of opinion-setting power make arguments that are so clearly misleading if you know the background, because it strongly suggests that it's not accidental, that the purpose is just to win over all the naive folk. And it's depressing because I have to imagine it works some of the time. Sigh.

[ksledgemoore.livejournal.com]

More hours can mean more money for the teacher, and more achievement for that teacher's students, which is just about all a good teacher needs to be happy.

I do remember this sentence and being equally annoyed by it for the reasons you stated! Does he realize how many hours teachers ALREADY work?! I hate when people assume that teachers work just the hours that they're in school. Hello, grading? Hello, preparing lectures, activities and lessons?! Hello, calling up parents? Supervising extra-curricular activities? argh


Earlier in the article he notes that teachers at one school district with long hours got paid 7% more than teachers at a neighboring school district with a six hour day.

Ok yeah I remember noticing this and being like, "well that's all they'd raise the pay?"

How about, you know, getting home before 9 pm?
You're absolutely right. On the days when Brad decided he didn't want to take work home with him so he did it that night for the next day, he got home around 8 or 9pm, and that's with just a 5 minute commute. So, that was a 10-11 hour work day right there. For a school with normal hours. (Actually, his school was a charter school and already did have slightly longer than normal hours, but not by that much.) I can't imagine how bad it would be under what this guy is suggesting. Yeah, you could just leave when classes are done, but that would mean you'd have to stay up extremely late grading and preparing every single day.

because hopefully the people actually making policy decisions have at least a passing familiarity with the realities of education

You'd hope, but unfortunately I feel like this is really not the case a lot of the time. :(

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

"saccharine moronitude" is an immmortal phrase.

"hopefully the people actually making policy decisions have at least a passing familiarity with the realities of education" Hahahahahaahahaha! *goes off to cry now*

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

The thing is, structuring their time better by making them stay at school longer will possibly mean they will learn more, but they won't be learning discipline/time-management skills.

I don't entirely agree. I think there are some students for which this is true, but others for which it is false.

The sine qua non students need to develop time management: constraints on their time. If you provide students with constraints on their time, some of them will just learn how to structure their lives well, and that's that. (On the other hand, these students were going to catch on to college even if high school didn't challenge them.) Some are going to be overwhelmed and are going to need external structure as a model for how to cope. The longer school days, including (one hopes) study halls (why o why are these so despised in the public schools?) and adult homework help, provide this structure. Additionally, having a lot of the homework happen within the course of the school day provides opportunities for adults to communicate with one another about what students need to do, making it harder for them to forget or fail.

Also, since the article was talking about inner-city schools, keep in mind the substantial possibility that many of these students do not have quiet places to do homework. Having them at school gives them that environment. This, in turn, gives them a chance to learn how to work effectively and structure their time. It also gives the school the opportunity to assign much more, and much more intense, homework than they might otherwise have realistically been able to expect, contributing to that "students need constraints on their time to learn how to manage it" thing.

It's true that there are some students who will stay structured only as long as there is that extremely strict structure around them, not internalize any of them, and then fall apart. But I believe they are in a minority. Students who have gotten into the habit of meeting high expectations will be much more skilled at it when they get to less structured environments.

[ksledgemoore.livejournal.com]

thanks for all of your comments! I will try to address them all here.

As for the class load, I guess I figured as much. For the private high school I went to, I believe my professors had 4 classes. My husband had 3ish classes that were doubled in length and coverage, thus, it was equivalent to teaching 6 at a regular school. I think he had to teach 4 one semester! He sometimes had 2 unique classes, sometimes 3. He never had just one class to prepare for.

As far as time management is concerned, I think that what kids learn from it depends. First of all, I like your "progression" idea because it certainly builds habits that will lead toward application in the college setting. The thing I gathered from this article was that maybe the extra hours would be used 100% in instruction, not in study halls or doing homework during class. In that case, I thought that maybe students wouldn't build necessary skills in discipline. However everything you laid out as a specific plan would help in this degree. So it depends on how you structure that time what kids will learn.

In sum, I've agreed with what you have written and it's nice to see your ideas. :)

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

My husband points out another thing, which is that the nine-hour school day is not going to be experienced by everyone in the same way. You can build in a progression, as students age, toward more independence. Here's how his high school did it:

9th graders: had study hall.
10th graders: could take their study halls as free periods, but had this mammoth term paper to write which took up a lot of that time. (Of course, being their first major term paper, it had all sorts of intermediate deadlines to help them structure their time.)
11th graders: free periods.
12th graders: free periods, some of which they were to use for an independent project of substantial size. (Clearly this is building on the long-term goal skills they have built in their 10th grade term paper.)

The school where I teach, which is K-9, has a similar thing: 7th and 8th graders have to check in to study hall but (unless they are on a list of People Who Aren't Working Hard Enough) can check out to the library or the computer lab. 9th graders don't have to come to study hall at all (unless they are on that list) and can check out to those places or a low-key hangout room.

Basically, within that day, however structured (and I work at a boarding school so the day is *extremely* structured) you can give the students a progression toward more independence and maturity, both in terms of what they are allowed to do with their time and the complexity and independence of the projects they are expected to do.

[supercarrot.livejournal.com]

with 9 hours of teaching, i wonder when he expects the teachers to write up their lesson plans.

[ksledgemoore.livejournal.com]

not to mention that the lesson plans would have to be even longer = even more preparation. The only way I see this plan working is by hiring a lot more teachers (not by making the existing teachers work more hours). That way you can go from teaching, say, 6 classes a semester to teaching 4.* So maybe you'd have to teach until 5pm if you got the unlucky slot, but hopefully that would mean you would have had a lot more free time in the middle of the day to do your grading and lesson planning.

*I just made these numbers up. My husband was a teacher but he taught at a school with a completely different blocked schedule so he only taught 3 or so classes a semester; I don't really know what teachers at typical schools do.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Even if you were still teaching 6 classes (which would suck!), more staff could make it a win if the periods were the same length; there could be more sections, so your 6 classes would have fewer students, so less grading, etc. And you could have more free periods, since there are more periods in a day.

(What teachers at typical schools do varies enormously. Anything from 4-6 classes would be a normal load, depending on how wealthy your school is. (I have four classes and a study hall; I have had five classes and no study hall. Of course, the number of *distinct* classes you have is almost as important -- 6 sections of algebra I is easier to prep for than 1 of algebra I, 1 of algebra II, 1 of geometry, and 1 of precalculus (albeit very very very boring to teach). It seems to me that 4 classes is pretty common in the private school world, 5-6 in the public.)

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

So, little as I get done during my study halls, it's not *that* bad. It's not busywork because most of the teachers assign hella homework, and the behavior management isn't *that* bad because most of the students understand that, if they get 40 minutes of their hella homework done *now*, that's 40 more minutes of Playstation *later*, whereas they do not have Playstations in study hall. Basically, the students have a purpose for being in study hall and they know it. (Compare to, say, the study halls where I went to high school, where we didn't have very much homework so...well, you can imagine.)

And sometimes I even do get things done in my study halls, even though I have apparently done something in a previous life to offend the study hall gods and thus have these ridiculous cursed study halls. I think that study halls are important for students' well-being and I'm willing to do my part to make sure they happen (at least, given that I have real prep periods ;).

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Yikes! That would explain the "no longer a teacher" thing. (I'd kind of assumed from the username and was surprised to see you say in comments you weren't now, but..again I say yikes! I wouldn't be either.)

(And elementary...*shudder* I teach 7-9, so it's not that much older, but it's a totally differently structured day. I have no idea how I would plan an entire day for beings with *even shorter* attention spans. Tons of props to my elementary colleagues.)

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Gah gah gah the suck.

Isn't that the way of it, though? I almost never hear the burned-out teachers complaining about the kids, unless maybe they're older inner-city kids with major violence issues. But all that stuff that gets between you and the kids? Everyone hates that. Yuck.

And I am totally interested in reading instruction :). I know nothing about it and I don't remember how I learned to read, but it seems so primal, and also tangentially related to what I do teach (Latin -- and I continually get the feeling that reading disabilities are manifesting and knowing about reading instruction would help me). Hopefully your work will get to make a difference for more kids, and other people will be doing the paperwork! :)

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I would love to hear the things you figured out :).

[roamin-umpire.livejournal.com]

Well, if it's any comfort, this will never happen as long as teachers are unionized. No teachers' union extant will go for something like this, and rightly so.

Unfortunately, the same can be said of most other educational reforms as well, and the reasons to oppose some of them aren't nearly so... just and well-motivated.

[drspiff.livejournal.com]

I could agree with adding 3 hours to the school day if it were designed to be unstructured time. That is, what if extra curriculars were included in the school day? For three hours you would go off to band or football practice or drama club or maybe just sit and read in the library. Because all those things are as important to a child's education as book learning. I think that would be good for students, especially if it happened in the middle of the day and gave them a chance to take a break. It would also give teachers a chance to get some of their grading a class prep done because now they just spend an insane amount of time unpaid outside of school doing that work.

yeah, but.....

[jmmartin19.livejournal.com]

That's going to open it's own can of worms, though. Who is going to organize and run these activities if the teachers aren't? If we hire more people to do that, the money will be going to the coordinators rather than the teachers. Not to mention, making teachers stay in school 9 hours a day when they might have non-work related things to do...like spend time with their toddler, or something like that.

I think having "unstructured time" at school would generally limit the number of things kids could do and put more pressure on the teachers because someone has got to look out for these kids. I mean...I probably would have had a VERY difficult time dancing 14 hours a week in high school if I had to attend school 9 hours a day.

On the other hand, when I went to private high school for my junior and senior year, I'd usually have 1-2 periods off during the day which were "unstructured". I'd usually spend it doing homework, or going to the coffehouse with jimmy, and that was nice. Those periods were only 45 minutes, though. There's a lot of trouble you can get into in three hours.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

We call this, "private school".

(Mind you, it doesn't give teachers time to get stuff done, because they are coaching or otherwise supervising the kids. But it's basically a good thing.)

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

So...I actually do think that a longer school day is frequently in the students' interest. The most precious commodity in any school day is time; there's never enough of it -- to teach a class, to give homework help, to make personal connections with students, to have clubs, to track down problems... Particularly in the schools the author seems to be focusing on, where kids may need a lot more individual help than they're getting, may not have safe things to do afterschool, and may not have a quiet and distraction-free place where they can do their homework, there's a lot to be said for it.

That said, of course:

Students do have finite attention spans. If you use the extra time to just do more of the same, you're going to put people on overload. You need to use that extra time to provide those different things (like individual help, like quiet study halls, like library and computer lab time, like clubs and sports) that don't fit within the day right now.

And teachers already work nine, or more, hour days in the context of our "seven" hour days. So expanding the work day to nine hours...

Actually, I work at a school where many people already have nine-hour days, come to think of it. Classes start at eight and, if you coach, you can easily not be done until five. And we're paid less than public school teachers. We're idiots! ...no, wait, we have selected students, strong parental support, and an excellent school culture which all compensate us. I seem to be saying that teachers can be brainwashed into that sort of thing, but I don't think that's what I want to say, so let's backtrack.

I think it would be OK if you added more staff. Considering that many teachers are already working the nine hours anyway...if you did *not* increase class loads, but let teachers take the extra time in some combination of more free periods, monitoring study halls/computer labs, and running extracurriculars (for additional pay)...it might not actually add hugely to any individual teacher's workload. But you'd have to have more staff to make it happen. What I'm seeing here is...if the *students* are taking the same number of classes (or core classes, anyway) but you have more periods in the day to spread them out over...you could offer more sections, providing smaller class sizes, which is good in a bajillion ways (and also reduces teacher workload in terms of grading, allowing admittedly increased teacher workload in terms or forging personal connections with students and giving individual help, but who wouldn't take that trade?). Of course, more sections + non-increased courseloads = more teachers. Which = more funding, but you were already proposing that when you proposed expanding the school day. (You not being *you*, per se.)

There's actually, iirc, a charter boarding school in DC which is operating for the sorts of reasons I name...closer adult/student interaction, provision of safe and quiet places to do work, disciplined environment. Of course boarding schools require teachers who are willing to commit 24/7 (but then you can do creative compensation, like free housing).

All of which is to say I don't think the idea is a complete piece of crap and it can be implemented in ways which don't demand superhuman teachers who sacrifice everything else in their lives to the school (except a boarding school and then, well, they were asking for it).

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Mind you, the man deserves smiting for this sentence: "More hours can mean more money for the teacher, and more achievement for that teacher's students, which is just about all a good teacher needs to be happy."

(Because, really. I need to pat my cat and ride my bike and read and take hot baths, preferably with my students absent, and have some sex, also with my students absent, and so on and so forth. But I've already ranted in my journal about the perniciousness of acting like education can be saved if only we have teachers who are willing to sacrifice their heart and soul to it every hour of the week.)

(What *would* make the teachers happier, besides more pay, which I think he's awfully naive about the possibility of achieving, are the sorts of things I outline: smaller classes, a more disciplined environment, personal connections with students, the chance to interact with students on an extracurricular basis if so inclined -- basically, a more pleasant work environment. Of course I am temporarily happy when students do well, but everyone's environmental happiness is chiefly conditioned on the day-to-day culture.)

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I feel like I should agree with you (I mean, I hate that indoctrination!) and yet I do not entirely.

I mean, I teach at a boarding school. So I have all these colleagues (not me...) who have signed on for a 24/7 job. Many of them have been committed to this field for years, even decades. They are raising their kids on campus. How much more involved can you be?

And I teach in the private school world. Here it's very common for teachers to coach sports 2-3 seasons (again, not me -- yay for no athletic talent!). When you stick on the coaching, yeah, most people do teach a nine-hour day, including proctoring a study hall. They do have 2 free periods in there, and an office hours period which might be free depending on student needs, but basically, 9 hour day. And yet there are many people who are committed to this long term.

Now, I doubt the population of people interested in doing that is large enough to staff the whole country. (Particularly when you're talking about public schools, which are much more likely to have that paperwork overhead you lamented earlier; most of my day really is direct contact with the kids, or prep periods to do something I decided to do.) But it's not totally impossible to get a good, even committed and experienced, pool of people to work something like that.

Of course, people doing that seem to combine it with this whole start-up feel, which pretty much does restrict you to the young and crazy people with no other commitments, and is fun right up until you burn out and rip your head off...

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Yes, very much so :). Trust me, I can still feel the things that make teachers burn out (I'm in my third year), but the forces getting into my heart and making me want to stay are at least as strong. And yes, it does have to do with having autonomy to teach my own way (which is a kind of respect), and having parents who (psychotic and divorce-ridden as they may sometimes be) expect their children to behave and to learn, and having huge piles of resources (which is not to say I am highly paid -- public school teachers almost always make more than private school teachers -- but I don't have to buy stuff for my classroom and the school will fund interesting classroom things and professional development).

And, going back to that autonomy, I think it has a lot to do with creativity. Public schools are really fixated on credentials, and, while I do support the idea that teachers should know how to do what they do, I don't think credentials (or the lack thereof), as currently constituted, are an effective way to measure whether they can. It's very common in the private school world to run into people who have had a pre-teaching career and this is treated as an asset (as opposed to public school, where not having gone straight into the credentialing process in college makes it practically impossible, and anyway what kind of suck-ass teacher are you to have not been born dying to do this?). And public schools tend to centralize curricula a lot, whereas private schools tend to give you a lot of leeway. So they attract creative people, and the ability to be creative with minimal bureaucratic encumberment is in itself a form of compensation.

They also tend to have much more all-encompassing cultures (especially at a boarding school) -- which is good and bad -- but teaching at a private school is really being a member of a community, and one which *includes* administration and parents.

[eldan.livejournal.com]

I don't have anything to add to the discussion, but I just had to say that assmilliner is a wonderful insult that I shall have to add to my repertoire. Arsemilliner might even work too.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Hee, thanks. I figure, asshats (or arsehats, if you prefer) have to come from somewhere. :>