[ExI] Fwd: year round school

Sat Nov 14 13:42:14 UTC 2020

Thanks Henry, great essay.

I too have a high schooler and agree: they like to stay up later than I do.  California schools took action on this and moved earliest start times back from 730 to 830.  Then the pandemic hit, which changed things even more, but in some ways for the better, at least for some students: they can drag out at 828, log on, be in class ready to go.  Eat breakfast after or even during, if they move the camera up to show only eyes.  Plenty do this.  I know for I often attend that very worthwhile first period class in the morning, so I can see who is doing what.

We recently heard Santa Clara public schools will be online the rest of the year because of disappointing covid numbers that plenty of us already knew were likely, for we know that flu travels best indoors, regardless of all other considerations.  It turned cool recently.  People went indoors.  School's online for the year.

Online school is very bad for some, not as good as in-person school for most, a benefit for a few.  The academically rich get richer, the poor get poorer.  We know.  A sizable fraction of the students don't even bother to participate: they log on, mute their microphone, set the camera to show only the top of their head, then play video games on a separate device.  As far as we know, the teacher is obligated to give that student a passing grade.  The failing students know this as well.  Some choose to get their pass and a free high school diploma.

Other students turn a bad situation around to their advantage.  I am a volunteer for American Math Competition, California Math League and Science Olympiad, so I am lucky to know the kind of students who make stepping stones out of stumbling blocks.  But I see plenty of students who find ways to turn stepping stones into stumbling blocks.  Some step up, some fall down.

spike

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of Henry Rivera via extropy-chat
Sent: Friday, November 13, 2020 9:02 PM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Cc: Henry Rivera <hrivera at alumni.virginia.edu>
Subject: Re: [ExI] Fwd: year round school

I’ve given some thought to this topic of hours and have authored similar letters as Bill and been a co-signer to some. Me and a cadre of local mental health professionals have been seeking a change in the hours of schools in our distinct for at least 5 years. My high schooler has to be in his first classroom at 7:45am. His brain wants ten hours of sleep but he and his peers like to be up well after 10pm. Getting them to bed on time meets with resistance and instances of sneakily texting from bed. Do the algebra if you graduated high school and can. He doesn’t get enough sleep and drags through days too often. The research and data on what adolescents’ brains need is clear. I think our failure to convince powers-that-be to change the hours comes down to sports. And this is true in other jurisdictions across the country. 

There are some parents and stakeholders that value and prioritize sports (which require, sometimes daily, after-school practices). Those parents see their kids come home after 1-3 hours of practice and have hours of homework. I used to have three hours of homework in high school. It seems like a little less for my high schooler  Then there is dinner to fit in and they want their kids to have some unstructured time before it’s time for bed. If you change the school hours your options are all of that after school stuff gets pushed back a few hours later such that there is no unstructured time after homework is done basically; or you move those sport practices to before school and make just those kids get up early to squeeze in 1-2 hours of practice before classes start at 9 or later for example. The sport people don’t want either, so status quo remains. 

Personally, I tried out for 2 sports early on in high school and ended up playing chess after school, working on the yearbook or school paper, doing community service, and or working on drama productions on the stage and light crew which could take 3-5 hours on the run up to opening night. I had an hour commute to my private high school most of the time. So I know what it’s like to get home after eating on the road and doing homework until bed time. I loved doing those plays I’ll have you know. I was not deprived, and I’m not complaining. It was a choice on my part to be doing that vs spending additional time bumming around with friends or playing video games. So I didn’t mind it and was willing to have those trade offs. 

If athletics program kids make similar commitments and don’t mind getting up early I think that would be preferred over the current state of everyone being forced to get up early and being disadvantaged. Consider many kids may have nothing structured like sports practice after school and thus no motive to ensure school ends early enough to fit in lots of stuff after school. 

-Henry 

> On Nov 13, 2020, at 8:57 PM, Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 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
> 
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