[ExI] Fwd: year round school

[William Flynn Wallace]

my letter to a legislator, head of the Education committee - your
thoughts?   bill w

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Nov 13, 2020 at 10:48 AM
Subject: year round school
To: <ddebar at senate.ms.gov>


Dear Sir,

I have a Ph. D. in Experimental and Clinical Psychology and taught for over
35 years.  The idea of a 'summer slump' comes from studies on memory that
do indeed show that students will do more poorly or even fail on tests that
they took just a few weeks or months ago.  Even at Harvard.  But, they were
not given the chance to study for them again - they had to take them cold.

That absolutely does NOT mean that those memories are gone forever.  No.
Memories that last more than a day or two are with us permanently, though
the longer we live the harder it is to retrieve them, mainly because of
competition from later memories.  There are some good reasons to have year
long schooling, but the 'summer slump' is not one of them.

The very best thing the Legislature could do to help students is to start
school later in the day.  At that age they are mostly night owls and wake
up slowly, so that learning at 8 o'clock is difficult.  They are there,
they are awake, but their brains are still fuzzy.  There are many studies
done by physicians and psychologists that validate those conclusions.

I do not think it matters with year long schooling how long the breaks
are.  I would be in favor of adding hours of school to the ones we have now.

Just on a tangent:  requiring Algebra is just wrong.  Fewer than 5% of the
high school graduates ever use it.  I am in a chat group with a bunch of
engineers and they concur - no value to students unless they are going into
science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM), and those students will
certainly take algebra, precalculus, and calculus if offered, along with
geometry, solid geometry, trigonometry.  Requiring algebra keeps many
students from graduating.  A waste of minds, in my opinion.  And a lifelong
hindrance to job prospects.  Of course it differentially impacts minority
students.

Sincerely,

William F. Wallace, Ph. D. University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
Brandon MS
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