[ExI] Fwd: year round school

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2020 at 7:32 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 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

I agree with Adrian about algebra being very useful, especially to
people who don't pursue STEM careers.

But I would turn this around on you. It's not so much that failing
algebra keeps kids from graduating high school, but that the high
school diploma was so important -- though nowadays, it's the Bachelors
and even the Masters in some fields. In fact, one can learn algebra
before and without getting high school diploma -- just as one can
learn to read, write, and even do complicated mental stuff without
said diploma. Yet someone without one is almost certain to be unable
to get jobs that don't even require more than, say, a fifth grader's
level of education in competence. Therein lies the real problem with
education today: vast expenditures to little effect mainly aimed at
credentialing people because there's a credentials arms race.

Again, I recommend Bryan Caplan's 02018 book _The Case Against
Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money_.

With regard to the summer slump, I think it will fix more things in
long term memory, but there will still be losses. For instance, how
much history or civics or high school French will you remember if you
went to school year round, graduated, but then never use any of these
for a decade? Surely, you won't be starting at zero, but the question
might better be why teach stuff kids aren't interested in, will only
remember on the test, and will only recall later if at all after much
prompting? What's the goal here? (Second language instruction, in my
view, should take place at a much younger age anyhow. That's how the
rest of the world tends to work with this. And given current
conditions in the US, the basic student in the US should be fluent in
Spanish as a second language before they reach puberty. And I've
nothing against having kids, provided they have a say, learning a
third language. Etc.)

I agree about the teenage brain being ready much later in the day.
Therein lies a problem: adults who are supposed to teach these teens
actually are better earlier in the day and fade earlier. So, it's kind
of a compromise one would have to look for here or some tech fix --
like having teachers from one timezone teach kids in another. (And, of
course, all kids aren't alike, so with the tech for remote teaching,
why not parlay this into suiting each class to the students and the
teachers across the globe? Kids who are really early risers -- though
few -- could go to early classes while the rest go later, especially
if it's mostly/all remote.)

Regards,

Dan