Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Longer School Year: Will It Help Or Hurt U.S Students?

In class today we briefly talked about how taking the summer off of school can be bad for students. The break from education, learning, and stimulating the brain is too long. I found this article and short clip that expands on the thought of shortening summer break, making the school year longer. A 3 year project is in effect in 5 states that will add 300 more hours to the school year. Although American students are far behind when it comes to Asian and European students, data does not show that longer hours are producing better results. In fact, Finland requires less school than America but students perform better than us.

I think that extending the school year or having year around schools can have some pros and cons. Some positives are having the students "work out" their brain, more or longer breaks in between quarters or semester, and even providing poor students with meals. Some negatives are taking time away to rest their brains from the workload of school, the extra funds for extending the school year, and arrangements families may have to make to accompany the new change.
 
Is there a way we can meet a common ground since research is showing that longer school years are not effective? What about assigning students a small summer project that will allow for some creativity, learning, exploring responsibility and time management, etc.? Is the problem the fact that there are bad teachers out there (as much as we don't want to admit it) or perhaps that the curriculum could use improvement?

What do you guys think?

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1 comment:

  1. Michelle ThomasAugust 29, 2013 at 7:09 PM

    Tai-Rhonda, I agree that there are pros and cons to this too. I understand that it is important to have a student go to school all year round but I think that having a break is important too. Especially with all the standardized tests students have to take now. They need summer to unwind and de-stress from school. I like your idea about having a summer project though. I think it is important for students to continue work a little but not full blown school. Teachers could ask students to read a couple of books over the summer, books the students are into and have them write summaries on them. The teacher could also provide an activity that would engage the students to think about the book on a high level of thinking. I thinking letting the student pick the book (within some guidelines)that they want to read though is important because then it is something that interests the student which is likely to keep them more engaged.

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