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I remember when I changed schools from Arizona to Alabama they used the year round system. Instead of getting 2-3 days here and there and a massive three month blob in the middle you get a shorter summer but longer breaks elsewhere. It really made it much easier to learn as well as plan for vacations during other time periods. Also to address the student learning... kids need more time with their teachers and less time focusing on testing. I'm atrocious at math because when I was in school it wasn't about learning the material but rather "testing". If someone had explained to me how to do it ... I might be in a much better place.
You're so right. The standardised testing is cutting into time better spent learning. The crippling "No child left behind" and main streaming challenged kids pushes kids forward who are not ready and they lag behind further while teachers are busy babysitting kids that are taking her time from students that have more potential.
scarletfluerr Oh I absolutely despise the "no child left behind" as it's utter bullshit. I can't entirely blame the teachers but I was a child that obviously never got the help he needed. Instead of learning the material I was passed long till my current state. I know I still need help if I ever go back to college but it's emberassing to admit how much.
Arcamean you are exactly right about this. It's the same way with politics, the politicians are always focused on getting elected and hardly thinking about actually getting things done. I wish schools had 4 tests per semester instead of the 8-12 we get now.
Arcamean That is so true, with the new syllabus system introduced in my country the teachers are stressing out because they are worried they won't be able to teach all the work for that term, so basically what that means is the teachers are so focused on getting the work done that's supposed to be done for the test and that leaves no time in carefully explaining the work and making sure the students actually know and understand it
wholeNwon Incorrect in curtain parts of the country, In my state, Schools are from 7 to 3, Do they teach you any basic out door survival? How to do your taxes, How to get a job, You know, The basics? The sun goes down around 3-4pm here this time of year, And instead of being outside, They end up inside, Doing another 2-3 hours of homework already on top of the 8 hour school day, Don't forget house chores and what not, Where is your free time? To play with friends or work, on your hobbies? School is already taking a large chunk out of a KID's life, What ever happened to being active and having a couple hours of fun? We spend 8 hours locked in a building learning common core and what happened to London in 1666, Instead of REAL education such as survival skills and how to build a resume, What to bring with you if you decide to go outdoors, They don't teach you that stuff, Many teenagers get lost on what they thought was going to be a quick hike because they were unprepared, When asked, What is their answer? "I didn't know", Why go to school and not learn at least the most basic's of survival? Just my two cents.
Now before you hit me with a "That is what parents are for" 1: That is what schools are for, To teach children because parents are too busy with work, If that is what parents are for, Why have schools at all? 2: Not everyone has educated parents 3: Not everyone has parents at all
+Nathan Zaremskiy I don't understand why there seems to be a problem. I attended public schools. Our day was from 8-3. We learned mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology, history, English, etc. There were art and music classes, etc. There was time for lunch and a short recess outside. There were quizzes most weeks and big mid-terms and final exams. Yes, there was time for some outside activities before or after dinner, then homework. Much more time for fun with friends on weekends, especially in the winter. We all developed good social skills, many continued our educations through graduate school. I had no difficulty obtaining good employment. Yes, I can follow written directions and complete my own tax returns though, to be honest about it, I use a computer. When I have to deal with K1s complicated by reinvestment of distributions, I employ a CPA. One of the important things a child learns throughout the educational process is to perform to expectations and then to exceed those expectations. Hard work brings success in whatever endeavor one encounters. In our house, each of us had our roles to play to make the family a success for us all. Mine was to be a good student.
I can't speak for all of the states in the US, but my state of origin, Ohio, we have an issue which either few know about or that few want to even talk about. You said on average the US spends about $115,000.00 per student, unfortunately not as much of that goes into the schools as you might think. Every year the Ohio State Board of Education puts an issue on the ballots for the citizens in the city to vote on to raise property taxes to give the school system more money, and when that passes, the schools don't get much of that, instead the members of the Board of Education give themselves raises, in fact the pervious head of the Ohio State Board of Education makes more than the state's governor. And if the school board doesn't get their issue passed then they cut programs from the schools so they can then turn around and give themselves raises, so the issue, in Ohio at least, is politicians using their positions as a Get-Rich-Quick scheme instead of serving the public as they are supposed to do. If this is going on in Ohio, it wouldn't surprise me if it were happening in other states too, and that would definitely explain why the US doesn't do as well as other countries that spend less per student than the US does.
Also, every year the school board has kids take tests to compare how the students are doing against students from other states and other countries, and when they find out that they aren't doing as well they make it look like they are by lowering graduation standards so that more students can graduate, so on paper it looks like they fixed the issue, but in reality all they are doing is dumbing down the students.
There is a video on UA-cam by Dan Rather which investigates the corruption within the Detroit school system. Surprise surprise money is going to hiring staff that do nothing, non-existent textbooks and of luxuries for members of the board...
I can answer that: Kids need time to be kids, not mindless worker robots. And Summer is awesome! It's the best season for having fun, unlike that horrible cold gloomy depressing _other_ season.
Same here in California. Some nutter decided to get rid of August vacation and give kids half of spring off instead. Makes no sense. It is still cold in spring and most families vacation in August when parents get time off.
chistine lane have you been paying attention to jobs versus students ratio? It's hard to get jobs because you have hundreds of applicants for only one job. school takes so much time out of a student's life due to increasing competitiveness for acceptance into university.. There isn't as much time for kids to get their work experience as checkout chicks during their schooling years anymore, and that means that when they do have time to search for a job without school pressures on them (ie. summer break), their inexperience is going against thousands of other kids who are also having their summer break at the same time. Market gets flooded with labour, and the youngest kids (14-15) are the ones soaking up the unskilled work because they don't have to be paid a minimum wage. Without work experience, you may as well not bother (especially because firms don't want to train/induct young workers who are just going to leave the job at the end of summer two months ahead). Summer also is the time when no one is hiring.. Especially if you live in Southern Hemisphere where summer coincides with Christmas (all hiring is done well before summer break even starts to prep for Christmas sales)
FrostyWolfZ true ,I hate school because I get stressed and it's so long . I'm separated from my family for so many hours to where we can't spend time together as much
FrostyWolfZ Well to that I say ain't nobody got time for that I'm gonna go to lifenoggin learn more than Finlands 608 hours and put that into a WEEK AND ALL IT TAKES IS A COUPLE SEARCHS First living thing in orbit СССР Name Lakia Gender Female Lifeform dog First Satellite in orbit СССР Sputnik 1 2nd satellite in space СССР A couple months later they send the second satellite with Lakia Name of object Sputnik 2 EVEN FIRST MAN IN SPACE AND FIRST ORBITING LAB! how in the world can СССР Afford that!? on the other hand First living man on moon go's to America and 2nd space lab
when the teachers have to teach just to give test after test all in the name of keeping up with other countries aka Common Core then its no wonder why students don't learn information
No, it's not to "keep up with other countries". It's to determine whether the teachers are earning their salaries and actually doing what they are supposed to be doing. Deficient teachers = deficient students.
True, though it's more an issue of testing for the sake of testing rather than testing to evaluate what a student knows. Standardizes tests are nice and wonderful because they are easy to grade and easy to compare, but they do a horrible job of actually showing what a student knows. I work in Asia, and I have students who consistently get 90 or 100 percent on an English tests yet can't tell me how they are or answer other simple questions.
I've taken thousands of tests in my life and every one of them examined what I knew. None were for "the sake of testing", whatever that means. If, as you say, English tests in your area fail to discover language deficiencies then they aren't properly constructed and the curricula/teachers are of poor quality.
wholeNwon That is the whole problem with testing; they absolutely aren't being constructed correctly. The school I teach at isn't unique. This is a problem at least in North America and all across Asia. 5 minutes on Google will tell you that. I got 80's all through school in math, yet can't divide and struggle with fractions. I got poor marks in English (lit) and Social Studies through secondary school, yet those proved to be my strongest university subjects when I am given personal evaluation rather than a standardized test. The reason for this is simple; tests in secondary school are about cramming and rubber stamping knowledge so that the teacher can move on, not about evaluating what a student actually knows. The whole point of test taking is to standardize evaluation, but that immediately removes individual evaluation and focuses only on cramming instead of internalizing what was learned. Of the thousands of tests you took, I guarantee that nearly every one was about cramming knowledge so that you could move onto the next test.
That's a paradox. How can the reason we're doing badly by the "common core" standard of measuring success be teaching kids to pass the "common core test" rather than doing some other thing that some people think is better.
More hours isn't what our schools need. Teaching them more practical information and not overloading them with absurd amounts of homework needs to be implemented.
I think a lot of students, including me, would agree with you. I remember students looking forward to summer vacation, even at the beginning of the school year. If school was year round, what would these students have to look forward to?
+The Pyro Gamer how about if I changed it up a bit and said we are gonna have no summer but instead you go to school at 9am and come back at 1pm, you will get a summer break of a week, a fall break of a week for thanksgiving, a winter break of 2 weeks for winter, and a spring break of a week. And the rest of the days will be used to fill in the amount of time taken from shortening school hours.
Professor Oak rather you must get children couple ticks up in Maslov scale. There is nothing teacher can do, if the student spends all their brain power thinking about "do I have food when I get home" "do I have home next week" "do I get attacked today" "do we have heat electricity and water in our home". first step in student education is student welfare and well-being. this is the concern of the WHOLE society, if education is seen as the concern of whole society. when welfare is taken care of we can start to talk about student motivation, teacher quality, teaching methods, evaluations. Note well feeling students typically have higher motivation. if basic welfare is not taken care of everything spent on educating the student is wasted, because the student is spending their energy on more imminent and important things, like staying alive and healthy. Which means social security is part of education. well fed, healthy and relaxed students learn better.
i prefer a school that sends the children year round except for 1 day on major holidays. i would pay for dorms to not have to worry about the kids. I have to make a living, teachers need to teach and parents need to earn income. simple...
+krim7 yeah but you will NEVER need history unless you get a job as a teacher or a historian which in that case then you need to know better than what school teaches you
What exactly does one have to learn to make an animal a man and then to make a man a civilized man...one who can contribute to making our human societies better for all? I suspect each of those stages requires increasingly more educational development. One can choose to live as little more than a brutish animal capable of ingesting food, eliminating waste and occasionally reproducing. Or one can choose a different, more emotionally rewarding life that accompanies a broad education.
Clearly we need english to teach that Maths is plural. No need for p.e. I would say English, Maths, Science, Computing, and an option to do some physical subject like engineering, design, music, etc, and critical thinking classes. Couple of hours a week of each, get it done in a couple of days. Heck, make it 2.5 hours each and cut the homework, and make it the schools responsibility.
I like how teachers would say they want their children to have better education and whats best for them but they treat their students very badly( the bad ones, not everyone) you know what i'm talking about
I was unlucky to have an algebra teacher that was like that. Stubborn as a mule and utterly incompetent in what she is supposed to do. Just about everyone who went to her class hated her and most of our grades are on the verge of failing. It became actually so bad that one my friends literally had to drop out for a semester because the stress of being put through the GPA deathmarch of a class is actually affecting her health.
Yeah. There is this kid named James in my class who got treated terribly because he usually and even when he had something good to say, the teahcer would say, "Too late. We're switching subjects." literally everyone hated her. Me too, her rules and punishments were too harsh for just mere talking or not completeting work in time.
bmorebruh Most teachers (public school) are assholes. English teachers are usually freaks. Math teachers usually don't have common sense, they only know math. However; my second math professor in college was one of the best teachers I have ever had. I hated math until I had her class. Some people just aren't meant to be teachers, there usually doing it for the perks.
As a senior in high school I wish we had shorter but more frequent breaks. A two month summer is longer than anyone needs it to be and just means that by September we've forgotten everything. Take 3 weeks off of summer and give us a fall break, another spring break, etc.
Just like the difference between urban and rural schools. Money and time are not the most important. It’s about how it’s taught and the willingness of students to learn. For years K-7 I always came home and answered “it sucked” to how was school. It wasn’t until the 8th grade that I realized I enjoyed school.
I can tell you from experience that the more time I spent in school, the more burnt out and less motivated I became, and thus the lower my grades where. It was always refreshing to leave for a few months and head back to school ready to learn again.
dont people ever consider life? all year schooling? shouldn't kids get to enjoy their lives? shouldnt both kids and adults get more freetime? the school/work week should be 2 or 3 days at most and adults should get summer vacation too. sure, productivity would drop but fuck productivity. even with the changes i mentioned above in developed countries productivity still would not drop so low as to not afford food which is really the only thing that really is necessary to live.
What a nice dream, but imposible. So many of your favourite services would not be posible, if adults would have sumer vacations and 2 or 3 days of work. Think about doctors, policemans, maintance of internet etc.
tmnsoon Let's say you need 2000 units of some curency for the desired lifestyle. There are people that make 4000, 5000, or even more units. But they are not the kind of jobs that can be part time. These are high wages after years of developing a career. You may have started out at 1000 or 2000, but after many years you reach 4000 or 5000 or more. Can you now switch to part time? You are so productive you can make 4000 or more for 40 hours of work. In 20 hours you should be capable of producing 2000. So you can have a good life style for half the money. That is how it should be, but it isn't because the only jobs that are available part time are the same jobs who are already low wage, fast food work, or something like that. Or maybe you can have a normal job, say maybe as a programmer, that can in theory also be aprt time. But will get any prmotions? Benefits? THAT's what i'm talking about! This is why SOCIETY must change. You can work part time but you CANNOT get a promotion part time or have any benefits like holidays. Of course if you have half a low wage you can't live off the money, but you could live off half a high wage. But no one allows that and that's not fair. LEt's say I make 2000 units as an employee and i;m a stelar employee, and the boss say hey, i'm giving you a prmotion. You can now get 3000. Another X maunt of time passes and he says here's another prmotion and you now get 4000... Can you say to your bos, "Wellm actually, if you really want to reward me for my hard work, I don't really want mre money. I like my current lifestyle. But I have too litle free time. Could you instead let me work 20 h for 2000 units?", could you? IDK, maybe you could, as far as i know, you can't.
I grew up in Northern Maine and we actually had some time off in the fall to work the fields to help with the harvest. We still had the summer off and we would go to school for a few weeks in August, have September and some of October off. We would not have summer break until mid June. This has changed somewhat now because of mechanized farming.
Another important factor to consider is that in the US, high school is MANDATORY until you turn 18, where in a lot of countries it's something you have to test in to, with those who don't make it going to technical school to learn a trade instead, so PISA's statistics are essentially comparing ALL american students to just the college-bound portion of students of the rest the world.
IONATVS Exactly. The high achieving (college bound, ........ no ACTUAL college bound not Starbucks training known as Poli-Sci) rank within East Asian countries.
+king_ Tesseract College? In South Africa, highschool is mandatory until the age of 16(about grade 9 or 10) and after highschool you normally go off to university if you achieve good marks at the end of your matrix year (grade 12), the philosophy I have is that you need a degree in something, like accounting or your doomed...
IONATVS clearly has no idea what he's talking about they tested these students at the age of 15 and highschool is mandatory almost everywhere until 16-17
Well there is a sort of bias in these statistics, but I would not argue it is because of mandatory schooling. There is a geographical bias that might have an effect on results. While the United States wants every region (urban, suburban, rural, rich, poor, public, private) to participate, other nations might only administer the tests in schools in areas that are more likely to score higher. That's why the first place usually goes to an urban area of China, not China as a whole.
Okay, doing some more research it appears I had had this effect over-emphasized to me. It USED to be a common practice to have technical schools replace upper secondary education for non-collegebound students in many parts of the world, but most of these changed their minds somewhere in the middle of the last century and made upper-secondary compulsory for everyone, with tech schools instead replacing POST-secondary schooling. There are still a surprising number of countries that don't require education after 14 or 15, (or don't have compulsory education laws at all) but most of them are not ahead of the US in this study
We are taught Pre-Calculus as soon as ninth-grade and have to write a seven-paragraph, A3-sized essay about four lines of poem, answer five short questions (which aren't short at all), solve a bunch of x and y in tediously tricky equations using Viète theorem and prove a line which have virtually little relation to one other drawn in a triangle inscribed in a circle half the length of the latter just to gain entrance to tenth-grade (high school); in the meanwhile, tenth-graders in America are being taught in a triangle a+b
The principal (pun intended) reason given for favoring year round schools is to maximize the use of the BUILDINGS, because in theory, adding an extra 30+ percent of hours to the building usage would mean the ability to educate, on average, 30+ percent more students with the same number of buildings. However, there are other ways to keep the buildings active, such as holding community education classes and voluntary (if you don't want to stay in 5th grade next year) tutoring sessions. And besides, students would have to spend part of their school year in different buildings in order to eliminate building "waste." Since technology makes self-education easier (Kahn Academy, Great Courses, Coursera, and web sites like this one), it might be better for students to have SHORTER classroom hours, during which they would do most of their "homework" exercises while the instructor is available to help immediately, rather than the next day, and make the reading of chapters in lieu of listening to lectures (or for students who prefer it, they could listen to recorded lectures at home), with the class time spent answering questions about the reading homework, then doing the homework "drills" in class. And with so much of our school cost consisting of school board office "palaces," we could cut those funds, move administration to more modest offices in less expensive areas of town, and put the money into "no child left offline" equipment and internet services (school-owned laptops and tablets would have tamper proof security firmware, and the law could impose especially stiff punishment for stealing THOSE devices; students whose families could provide equipment would be eligible for free internet access on the school network, in addition to the internet connections their families could provide).
Tamper proof security firmware does not exist, and the theft of equipment is a serious problem when you realise you are giving it to vulnerable children. Even worse you propose to give this equipment to children from poor families who are more likely to live in dangerous areas. and can't afford transport to get them home safely.
Precisely. I currently am attending a school in which we have no homework. This DOES come with a drawback though, my average time in school is about from 8.15 am to 3 pm. While my brother, going to high school is actually spending less time in school than me, in middle school. However, i highly like this approach, as having homework seriously lowers my happiness level and morale. Homework is ONLY given out if you cannot finish your school task, which is always possible to do in school, IF you focus while you are there and do your assignments. I have indeed went to a school in Croatia in which i have homework, and the huge difference there is that we always end at 1.30 pm, which is way shorter than in Sweden, where i am currently. But we did get a TON of homework, which definitely lowers one's happiness level.
Allan Richardson schools dont pay anything in my country,water and power are payed by the government,there are no taxes for school buildings and the students must buy books.
The big reason for a push to year-round school is the amount of progress the students lose over a long break. This is most true for subjects like math and reading (where regular practice is important) and for impoverished students (whose parents are least likely to have time to work with them over the summer). a better system might be to spread the break out into pieces, (e.g. 2 weeks on, one week break) but keep the same the number of hours the same.
The school breaks have nothing to do with giving students a break. It's the TEACHERS that need a break. If teachers had to deal with annoying kids (all children besides your own are annoying) they would go insane and start killing them.
Year around was amazing for me(grades 4th-12 in southern california). No summer slide where you forgot how to do long division or something fairly technical. Another vacation just 3 months after returning to look forward to and not getting bored with 3 months of being a kid with no money or transportation generally. I'm amazed to hear anyone would ever go back to the traditional schedule
I think that in the U.S., we have a very relaxed belief about education within each family. You go to school cause "why not," and not necessarily because it's good for you. In other cultures, school and education are much more highly valued. And as for math, some languages are just better at doing math than English. I've heard that Mandarin's way of naming numbers helps them do math better; there aren't any bizarre rules, such as having numbers called "eleven" that make no sense, since it should be called "tenandone."
Avdhoot Kulkarni Oh, French sucks, too--as do all the European languages. But, again, that's not the main reason why we're falling behind in the U.S. It's our dislike of education and the fact that we teach those bad values to our kids that causes them not to do well in school. That is, of course, different from family to family; however, overall in the U.S. most families don't see education as important, relative to northern Europeans or Asians.
Epyrian yeah in mandarin the number make a lot more sense. Like eleven is 十一 which would literally translate to ten one. Thirty four would be 三十四 or three ten four. Their months and days are also numbered instead of given names. Monday is 星期一 or 1st of the week, basically. December is 十二月 or ten two month/twelve month.
Em Yeah... in English the months are really confusing. The most confusing months for me are september to december, because september literally means "seventh month," but today it's the 9th month. They've all shifted by 2. I think the least we can do in the U.S. is adopt the scientific METRIC system, and stop using the Neanderthalic "imperial" system. Person A: How far away from here is the store? Person B: It's about 100 of my feet. Really? We're using hands and feet to measure things still in 2016?
I attended a year-round school for a year or so while living in Florida. It was....interesting to say the least. Most weekends were 3 day weekends so we had more time during the week to play/relax. The downside is there was obviously no big chunk of time to do the vacation thing.
US math scores would probably improve if they did away with the "Common Core" system of teaching, if students were taught to actually think instead of reaching for a calculator, and teachers actually cared about the kids learning rather than just being able to pass state mandated tests.
I think all students should be given a calculator on tests, no point in learning how to do basic operations manually. Many of my math teachers even allowed us to use computers/math engines. What is important is understanding the math, remembering how to take a derivative is useless when you can have a computer do it, but being comfortable enough with math to use it in everyday situations is something I rarely see and is really the most valuable thing you can get out of a math education
The problem is not common core is bad. The idea of common core is to focus on critical thinking. The problem is that a majority of teachers don't care about the reasoning and logic, and opt to teach memorization.
Actually, when I went to high school, calculators were primitive. To do Calculus, we needed a manual slide rule and a whole lot of #2 pencils, graph paper, and regular ruled paper. Calculators weren't permitted until college.
I taught at a year-round school for 2 years. We taught the same number of days as traditional schools, just with 3 weeks between quarters and a VERY short summer break. Between the incompetence of planners (no AC in July and August) and the fact that no one break was long enough to decompress, I was at the end of my rope. So were the students, but they didn't have any choice... I got the heck out; they stayed.
Living and studying to become an educator (currently a substitute teacher) in NYC, I can see benefits outside of academic progress for a year-round school system (I specify my location as I know that the demographics and concerns are different here than elsewhere). A lot of children have parents who work year-round without means to have child care for the summer months so it could keep children safe and "off the streets" for lack of a better phrase. What I think would work best is a system of shorter days (for instance 8am-1pm) with intermittent 2 week-long breaks (say every 8 weeks or so with a possible longer break in August, the hottest of the summer months). There would still be after school programs offered to students who have parents who work (they typically operate until 6pm) and even if funding can not allow such a long free after school program, it significantly reduces the amount of time a student has without adult supervision since they will not have the typical 2 1/2-3 months during the summer. It would also make child care more feasible for parents as they only have to fund a few week's long supplement spread throughout the year instead of a cluster of months in a few pay-periods. It would also give educators more time to teach subjects which, because of the standardized testing in place now, is lacking for true learning and exploration. And of course, it would keep children's brains engaged more consistently as having such long breaks between acquiring new information in a school setting can greatly affect their performance.
Interesting. I grew up in Brooklyn, NY and had to do summer school once. The heat was just unbearable with no A/C. That alone was enough to keep me from having failing grades in the future.
Theycallmecurlie How many kids would actually feel the difference between the 11 weeks they get off now to 6? After just a few weeks the students will lose count.
Another major issue with year round school is continually differed maintenance on school buildings and equipment. It's obviously hard to to major maintenance (roof repair, HVAC, etc.) when the school is full of students, so normally this is done in the summer. When California experimented with their year-round schedules a lot of schools fell into fairly heavy disrepair. MY high school (norther CA late 80's) was year round, not to add instruction hours but to add more students, with the students cross-tracked in order to pack 30% more students into the existing buildings.
In America, schools are funded through property taxes in their district. This is why more money is spent per student in wealthier schools, while poorer students lose out.
You need to remember, our teachers are paid exorbitant salaries, at least here in Pa., and this adds to the total cost of one child's education. I'm not sure if the rest of the country is held hostage by teachers unions, but, I believe if we could lower salaries, spend more on actually educating the kids and end tenure, so we could weed out bad teachers, we might have a shot at coming in higher than 36.
KitsuneRogue which is wrong, hence why we need teachers unions. You shouldn't earn more managing shelf stockers at a supermarket than a educated teacher. They work with everyone's least favourite people, children. And they educate the next generation, arguably the most important job in the world. The poster doesn't know what he's talking about, teachers educate children.
(TheDajamster) I agree, I've seen it while in public school. In my town, average income is higher and school taxes are pretty exorbitant (on average equal to private school tuition). While in the inner city areas, funding is extremely low and schools have problems even buying basic equipment. Also it does not help that disparities in teacher salaries further widen the funding gap. Because of high crime rates in poorer areas, the only way to attract well-educated teachers is to offer more benefits/pay. Nicer areas do not need to do this; I once questioned a representative from a teachers union and they said safer, richer districts actually pay teachers less money in exchange for the area's greater security. Funding public schools through district property taxes clearly does not work on a whole because there is definitely segregation based on socioeconomic status.
Actually in certain states where you grow things like watermelon and musk melon kids were needed in the summer months for harvesting. In Arkansas, the last of that harvest usually happens at the end of July or the start of August. We are still an agri country in a lot of ways. Our local schools usually give kids off the first day of deer season because they aren't going to be there anyway. During planting season
Isn't America one of the few countries that put all students of the same age into one room with different education lvls and expects them to learn the same way?
No, they don't expect them to learn anything. The whole purpose is to drag the majority down to a low level so that the kids of the wealthy face less competition.
Icy Dice No the UK does the same. Unless you are SEN, you are in the same class as other kids your age. Although in my primary school there were different colour groups for each ability level. Each group had their own table. Green was the highest, yellow was the lowest (focus group).
it is not only about farms, cattle still need to be kept year round, spring was roundup time (after the birthing) and needed to bring the cattle to market. which lasted for several months where kids were not typically needed that much in roundup but needed for the drive itself, were boys kept the ramada, and still today in cattle states where school year are a little shorter than most places, what they did in new york city might not what they did (even teach the same thing) in texas, or montana
It's largely cultural. Sad as it is, younger kids face a degree of shaming in western nations for enjoying academia. That's instilling a mindset in students that it's not okay to pursue and enjoy learning. This phenomenon doesn't appear to be as prevalent in Asia. I'm not saying it's the be-all and end-all, but it certainly must play a role.
I agree with what you say about kids in the US being kind of bullied for liking school, but I wouldn't be so quick to say that it's the opposite in Asia. We tend to get the idea that Asians are super humans who are awesome at school, when that isn't really the case. Asian kids are really not that much different from American kids. The real difference is the pressure they receive from their parents to succeed in school. And I feel that this is also a problem which has resulted in Japan and Korea's problem with high teen suicide rates. So it's not so much that Asian students LIKE to study, it's that they have more societal pressure to succeed academically.
Really? Maybe it is just my parents but i actually got a game dev job. and my dad became a pumpkin breeder, warehouse manager, tile installer and pumpkin farmer. All of those are hard to do and require a lot of intelligence, and i do not mean to brag but it is true because working at mcdonalds is not that hard.
Also from what i've heard, in several Asian countries like China AS I UNDERSTAND IT. If you suck at school, your basically given up on. Like they don't allow for middling, plodding along students. Either your doing great or your out, the state won't actually let you keep going if you aren't good at it.
Don Ziolkowski I'm not so sure about schooling in China, so that could be true for all I know. But it's not like that in Korea. In Korea there is also a lot of pressure on the teachers to make sure that the kids do well. So when I had students who were falling behind I was told to hound them more until they started improving. I never heard of students being left behind or given up on, which isn't to say that it can't or doesn't happen, just that it's not the norm in the case of South Korea. The most that will happen if you're not such a good student is that you will have a harder time getting into better schools in the future, which is not just for college, but also middle and high school. And I've heard that it's really important that you get into the best college possible if you want to have a better chance of getting a good job in the future because of all the fierce competition.
My kids were in what was called " year round school" for a few years when we lived in KY and they got out of school for what felt as more than they had previously when it wasn't year round and still got 2 months off for summer. I believe the cost of running a school and heating and cooling it is why it wasn't truly year round. We lived out in the country and the school they went to was kind of small but also really good in winning awards. But while my gifted daughter sailed through school effortlessly even in her advanced classes, my son, who isn't learning impaired but does learn much differently than most other kids, fell behind but they passed him through anyway, not knowing how to deal with him and to this day at 13 doesn't know the basics to math and thus can't grasp an understanding of the harder stuff. The school passed him through preschool all the way to 4th grade without even knowing the difference between a dime and a nickel, which astounded us when we found this out a few years ago. We moved states to TN to a school that was supposed to be very good in order to help him but to no avail. He shows Autistic traits but very high functioning and is a brilliant artist. Most things he learns, he learns from me and not school. I feel that the 3 month break each summer can stunt many children if they don't continue studies outside of school and keep their minds in a learning framework.
Mara Henao 1st Angers kids 2nd kids riot 3rd kids kill teachers 4th kids tell parents I just killed 7 people because school got year round 5th kids kill the people who made it happen
I think multiple short breaks around the year wouldn't break the kids' school routine as much, thus making their learning more effective. With short breaks they don't forget as much as they would over the long break. And I think that after a break the motivation is increased, so having more breaks could affect them positively in that way too.
As a person who works in a school district, you are probably wrong. Everything gets jettisoned after Summer but only small bits are forgotten after the other three breaks.
I went to a year round school. I remember that my Kindergarten (1989-1990) was traditional and then 1-6 was year round (1990-1996). The school was divided into 4 tracks and at any given time (with the exception of a few key weeks) there would be 3 of the 4 tracks at school at any point in time. Every track would get periods of time off that were anywhere from a few weeks to 6 weeks. I remember my track had its big time off from around Thanksgiving to New Years. Everyone still went to school for the same amount of time and still had the same number of break days but it wasn't one 12 week break. The only vacations I remember taking that conflicted with the school schedule were actually during the late winter was for skiing. I thought it was actually better as you had regular breaks rather than one long break. Its also a fairly effective way to have a school which can accommodate 300 students have a population of 400 students. There was a bit of a transition to middle school which was the regular schedule. I remember in high school wanting to get rid of spring break and instead have 5 Fridays off in a row and even thought of adding a week at the beginning and end of the school year and adding an extra 8 Fridays off. So one out of every 3 weeks you got a Friday off.
school fucking sucks, how the fuck is it ok for me to know the difference between a sedimentary rock and a metamorphic rock but I dont know how to pay bills. Hell I would go so far to say I could learn everything I learned in school on the internet
Seriously, paying bills isn't that difficult -- you get the bill, and you pay it by the due date. What IS difficult is learning to budget your income to be able to pay those bills. AND to figure out what hourly rate times how many hours per week you need to be able to pay bills. Which is something that PARENTS should be teaching their children.
Year-round schooling is a misnomer (its not 365, 24/7). In Australia (where I'm from), we have four 10-week school terms and they are broken up by short seasonal breaks (2 weeks in autumn/fall, 2 weeks in winter and 2 weeks in spring) with a 6-week long break during summer.
I remember my high school tried a thing, where they shortened the break in the summer, lengthened the break in the winter and everyone did half days with options to go down to the local college for a couple extra courses if they wanted. And well, we where preforming way better and the teachers wheren't too put off by it and it worked out in general, we still had the same amount of time, just more breaks here and there and the half day course work meant that students had more time to be kids and get rest while teachers didn't have to deal with as large of a class.
Exactly. When they've said it in the video I thougt "Wait. So some of the childen are not allowed to eat in school? WTF?" Here every one is eligible for lunch. It's not really free. But it's heavily subsidizes so it cost maybe 10 - 20% percent of what it would normaly cost. But every child/student can have that lunch.
Every student in the US has a lunch, whether you want one or not. The difference is that more affluent families can pay the 2 dollars a day for the meal or send their kid with a bag lunch. The poor are subsidized to be given a free lunch. There are also many programs and grants that give free breakfast as well.
krim7 why not just tax fund all the public school meals for all children. it would save tons of bureaucratic hassle. it must be a bureaucratic nightmare for school to figure out who does and doesn't need to pay.
A huge issue with my school (& most if not all public schools in Australia) was what was called ‘teaching to the test’ - the short explanation is that our school was forced (through funding) to train us how to make good test scores, at the direct expense of our teachers being rendered unable to actually teach. The school’s funding was tied to how well the students scored on tests/exams, which meant that teachers had to spend a lot of time teaching us how to pass tests/exams rather than teaching the actual subjects (& yes, they are very different things) - each school year the time spent teaching to the test increased, until well over half of my final year was consumed by practice exams & being taught the various technical aspects of figuring out what the examiners were looking for & giving it to them. The end result is that while I couldn’t tell you much of anything about any of my core subjects, if you hand me a test on damn-near anything other than maths or languages I don’t speak & I’d get not far under a passing grade first time - give me a weekend with that year’s textbook & I’d knock it out of the park, hell, that’s how I passed all but one of my first-year university exams even after missing roughly 80% of lectures/classes due to health issues (the exception being when I had to dissect a cockroach, & thus couldn’t get around the technical instruction I’d missed). It’s a horrendous system that cripples students who can’t afford private teaching, & thoroughly destroys whatever desire the students may have had to learn, & it grinds to dust any passion, desire & even capacity that teachers have for teaching, leading to burnt-out teachers who then either disconnect entirely as a defence mechanism or slowly become bitter, resentful & vindictive. While a student I saw good teachers & students break completely under the pressure of the constant push for better scores at all costs, sometimes with tragic results. It’s obscene, & ultimately tests/exams (as they exist currently) don’t actually gauge how much a student has learnt, just how good they are at decoding what the examiner wants in a set timeframe.
1. China is rather well know for falsifying scores to make themselves look good. 2. I like the the way the German's do year round schooling. They go to school for a weeks or so and then get some time off, rinse and repeat.
LexieAssassin well firstly it is not China. it is shanghai. So "China" doesn't have a PISA score. City of Shangai has a PISA score. So factually we don't know what overall Chinese score is, because China as whole has newer been tested. it ain't even cheating. Rather media constantly falsely reports that China has PISA score x, when it is fully openly reported in the testing that only Shanghai participated. it is like testing NYC and then media saying USA has PISA score x. It might be representative, it might not. We simple don't know, because only NYC was tested. They would have to test elsewhere in USA to know for sure.
2. Hm, this is a little too simplified. Of course we don't have some time off after one week, but the general principle is true (although vacation times vary from Bundesland to Bundesland). In Bavaria, it's something like this: school starts around the 12th of September, 3rd of October is a holiday all over Germany, the first week of November is off ("fall vacation"), also on the 3rd Wednesday of November there is no school. Then we have vacation from Christmas eve to 6th of january, one week off usually on february (the week of Ash wednesday), two weeks around easter, two weeks starting from Pentecost and then 6 weeks in summer starting from the 1st of August (which is the "big" vacation between school years) All in all this leads to the same amount of vacation, but spread more equally
Summer is generally seen as the only season that certain activities can be done. This not only applies to the kids and teachers, but the school itself. It allows for renovations to be done to schools during the summer break and in Canada those renos would be difficult in the winter. For junior/high school students summer is vital for work. If kids were kept from the workforce until graduation they would have difficulties later in life. If one was a fan of year round school a way it could work is via a system seen in the oilpatch/diamond mines. Where students would attend alternating. 2 weeks of class and 1 or 2 weeks off. That would minimise the "dumbing" effect of being out of class for 2 months and saving the 2 weeks wasted on review. having a week or 2 off every 2 weeks would still allow for vacations(year round) however would interfere with first jobs.
Sky Eye not getting smarter, just being more efficient. You see we start at age 7. According to research formal schooling before that is waste of resources and teaching time. The brain and mind simply aren't developed enough the learn in a formal fashion. Same with instruction time per day. Adding more teaching doesn't help, because brain doesn't have endless capability to focus and learn. it needs rest and breaks, otherwise teaching just goes in from one ear and out of the other. sometimes less is more. Not because we Finns are idealists, but because research says that is how the human brain works and fighting against biology is pointless.
The most confusing thing is that US school years don't match up with calendar years. Here in Australia School Starts about February, and ends in December, with starting later and finishing earlier occurring as you get into Grade 10, 11, 12. It's much easier to manage and remember schooling years, as they start and end just like Calendar years. I did my final year of schooling, Grade 12, in 2011.
Here in Australia, the year starts around the end of January and ends around early or mid December, in line with the calendar year. While that means that, yes, the schools here take a long break in our Summer just like America does in their's, I think following the calendar year just makes more sense in general. If the seasons don't matter so much, you'd be taking time off around the end of year holidays that way instead, a traditionally important time to go spend some times with relatives, etc. I don't think year round education is a solution for anything (the mind needs down time to process things and unwind if nothing else) but a year being a single year instead of strangely ovelapping 2 by half, really does make a lot more sense to me. Of course, I am biased though, being brought up with that as the norm. The only thing I can think of that's even vaguely similar to the American school year here is the financial year (which starts/ends somewhere around June). That has a reason though, in that it's a comparibly financially quieter time of year. If companies had to sort out their finances around the busiest time of year (the end of the year, Xmas), that's be hell. School doesn't have that problem though.
bouncy house Sure. Having to deal with kids every single day and their parents wears on you mentally and emotionally. By June, you're ready to run for the hills. We need the 1 1/2 month to 2 month break from them to recharge our batteries and return rejuvenated.
I was in a year around program in junior high. It was a small amount of students out of the rest of the students who attended regularly. I actually liked it. We went for 9 weeks and off for 2 or 3 weeks during the school year. This was in Texas during 1994-1996. I would prefer that than the regular school year. I understand how it could be difficult with a parents work schedule.
Who cares about China, they're only claiming the territory as their own but it's actually its own country with its own government, currency and military. It's not recognised by foreign governments because they don't want to make the big baby cry, which always likes to be done their way and if otherwise it's "hurting the feelings of the Chinese people," or, as a lot of people like to call it, break the Chinese people's "glass hearts" (打破中国人的玻璃心). I'm aware of this fact because I'm studying Chinese language in a Chinese university, and accessing UA-cam through a VPN.
Without getting political, that name is at least a poor description. I'm sure the data represents the whole island of Taiwan and not just the city of Taipei. BTW, if we ran the world according to what China says, we shouldn't even be here on UA-cam.
I'm all for year-round schooling, but not so that more hours can be put in - that just strikes me as absolute madness. I'd rather get two weeks off for spring break and a three at Christmas, and so o, than three months all at once in the summer. Same amount of vacation, just spread across the year.
3:00 I agree that kids should go to school all year, but both students AND teachers need breaks from each other. When I was in 3rd and 4th grade they tried a "45/15" program where we had classes for 45 days, 5 days a week then got a break of 15 days. I loved it. Summer wasn't so long it got boring, and you weren't out of school long enough to lose much of what you had learned.
90% of the crap they try to teach us we will never use in the real world, we need to be taught how to balance a checkbook and how to be financially successful instead of knowing how to use a fucking calculator...
U.S has other issues when it comes to education. What I'm referring to is the atrocious Common Core standards that some states are implementing. I grew up and attended school in Pennsylvania a Common Core state and sophomore year I ended up moving to Virginia a non-Common Core state. In the state of Virginia I was a year and a half behind the rest of the students in my grade due to being in a Common Core environment before. Needless to say I barely graduated high school because things in Virginia are at a much higher level than in Pennsylvania. So what would help the U.S more? Simple ABOLISH THE COMMON CORE STANDARD!
One of my biggest regrets is how I completely slept and ignored my studies one year when I had a great teacher who really tried. Even though I had spent the entire half of the year doing nothing she would always call my parents personally to tell them that I wasn't paying attention. I remember deleting a lot of those voice mails.
Students from poverty areas going to government schools should be getting the same results as non-poverty areas PROVIDED the education is delivered to the same quality and course material.
Ernest Bywater Schools are funded from local property taxes I'm pretty sure, so poorer areas have less money to fund their schools and as a result the schools are worse. Vise versa with wealthy areas
Your comment might have some relevance IF all the schools within a district were being funded to the exact same per student rate from each source of funds. In which case they should be getting the same test results as feedback. But that doesn't appear to be the case on either funding or results.
also danger poor area have more gangs and people who have options tend to find that bigger negative, and kids from those areas are more likely to have mental/ family problems, etc
the one thing that i would love to know is that (especially in the UK) why the year starts in September and not in January. I agree that the year could have started in September for the states, but what about the UK, for example, so if it was a similar thing of dating back to when most of the children were needed on the family farm.
Chinese Taipei? Someone is catering to the one China policy. There is only one name that matters and that's the one on the passport; Taiwan, Republic of China!
I'm a Junior and 17 years old in southern California, personally, i think that the system should work the same way as in East Asia, mainly speaking for Korea and Japan. where students go to school like this, 1st) School days go from Monday-Saturday (Mon-Fri from 8 or 9am to 4 or 5pm, with Saturday being some-what a half day from 8/9am to 2pm) 2nd) School should instead of having 2 months off for summer, make it where you have 1 month off for summer best being August for it being so hot, and 1 month off during the winter, best being January for it being so cold (this would prevent more sickness from both types of whether), but would still give vacation time off for specific holiday's for example thanksgiving, Easter, and presidents week. 3rd) School should make more time for doing homework in class (relating for reasons of #1) and if they need to, they could possibly make an acception for any necessary block schedules that would follow suit with the Monday-Saturday schedule.
Most year-round school initiatives in the US do not focus on increasing the number of hours spent in classrooms. Most aim to reformat the hours to reduce time off in the summer (and allow longer breaks in the middle of the year). Most US schools, for example, have a 10-12 week summer break, 1-to1.5 week winter break, and about 1-1.5 weeks split between fall and summer breaks. Year-round propositions frequently reflect the British and Australian school year, which have 6-8 week summer breaks, and longer seasonal breaks or half-term breaks (1-2 weeks in fall, 2-3 weeks in winter, and 1-2 in spring).
The problem with American education is QUALITY, not quantity. The U.S. education system is very poor in modern times, and getting worse rather than better.
Having the summer off of school never made sense to me. Especially when it comes to sickness, far more kids were sick in the winter. Not to mention bad weather like rain and snow obviously being more common in the winter, closing schools for certain days and sometimes weeks. And as a student, I would have loved a year round school. You got breaks far more frequently, even if each break was shorter. Instead of spending 9 months praying for summer to come. This leads to the real problem with American schools. Its not the amount of days we go to school. Its a host of compounding problems which affect our time in school itself. Most of my teachers were underpaid and had no time to learn new things. Usually working double shifts just to make ends meet (it was very common for a PE teacher to also be a History teacher or a Spanish teacher to also be an art teacher, etc). They didn't have time to learn new material in their primary subject. All their time was spent just working two jobs. But the longer a teacher worked, the higher their salary rose. When their pay rose high enough, the teacher would be able to go back to teaching just one subject. But by that time, they were usually 20+ years past college and drastically behind in even that one subject. And many just gave up. Especially the teachers who gained tenure. Why even bother to teach a class at that point? They could just stand up and babble on about Julius Caesar and hobbits, despite the fact that its a math class. Leaving the student to have to go try and figure out how matrices work from an outdated textbook. And its ridiculously hard to learn how to do math with no visual examples. Because of this and a laundry list of other problems, many people are looking for the federal government to take over all schools. This sounds good on paper. But in practice, I can see many of the same problems reoccurring. And on a massive scale. Schools are already having enough trouble being regulated by a small committee in the downtown of said local city. Imagine of all schools across the nation are now being controlled by a federal department in Washington DC. For the record, schools in Washington DC get their funding directly from Congress. And it has produced some of the most dangerous and lowest testing schools in the nation. I think a more practical solution would be to pay teachers a higher wage, but based on test scores. Not the students test scores, but giving tests to the teachers themselves. Hold the teacher to the same standard as the student. And it has the added benefit of measuring if the teacher actually knows their subject. As well as if they are coherent enough to remain a teacher.
the spring and fall break used to be two weeks long. this was done away with many years ago in my area of the US. that break was in fact when most planting and the harvests where brought in. I don't know if they have more than a day or two off in spring and fall anymore.
What a strange approach to year round schooling, the ones we have here in Alberta, Canada, have their vacation time spread out over the year and no extra class hours. And they can still participate in most major sports with ease. They still get a month off in the summer, a month around Christmas and a month around Easter.
No, full year school won't help. Here in my country implements a full-year school, and we only have 2-3 weeks of break per semester. Here, the state high schools start their lesson at 7 AM and finish by 4 PM, so with a 5 days a week, and around 10 effective months (12-holidays), we spend over a whopping 1900 hours of school a year. And what I can tell you, is that these many school hours make you exhausted both physically and psychologically, and that students would still have to attend extra lessons outside schools just to make their grade pass. These many hours though, doesn't translate well into performance in college, as not a lot of my country's graduates don't really perform well internationally. Furthermore, the amount of time that is spent in school activity reduces the available amount of time to socialize with neighbors (tropical country so daylight's over at 6), to interact with family, and to do even extracurricular school activities. What needs to be done instead IMO is to optimize the curriculum, make it so that students can learn AND understand the most with the least amount of time required.
Hi I'm 60 and when I was a boy in Northern England one week a year we would go down to the local farm's and help harvest the potato crop for local farmers. I don't know if this was officially sanctioned or just a arrangement with the principal, nevertheless it happened.
As a teacher, I'd definitely advocate for year-round school. 3 day weekends with 2 week breaks at the beginning and end of summer. This would reduce week-to-week stress as well as allow time for exams to be conducted outside instructional time at the cost of only a few extra weeks in school; this could also allow schools to invest in more extracurricular projects. Year-round school doesn't necessarily mean a year in the classroom; students and teachers could spend a couple weeks a year doing service projects around town, competing in Olympics-like games w/ other schools, or going on day trips. Most of my students have lived in this city their whole lives and no little to nothing about it.
As a future teacher and someone who comes from a family teachers, I think people have a misunderstanding of "year round school." Instead of a 3 month summer month, many schools have a 1-2 month summers and longer vacation weeks (ex: my sister has a week off in October and a week off for Thanksgiving, and then 2-3 weeks off for Christmas in exchange for a shorter summer). This system benefits low-income schools for many reasons. 1) those families probably cannot afford vacations in the first place, so half of the argument becomes irrelevant 2) those parents cannot afford to take time off for summer, so children are left at home all day anyway 3) children who are left at home may not get entertainment, AC, adequate meals, etc... all of which many schools provide for children 4) many elementary schools have summer school programs anyway through the YMCA or Boys and Girls Club (kind of like an all day after school program), so the government might as well help with funding it
Now what about separating the 3 months of vacation over the year? You'd have 3 months on and 1 month off. This way, the break isn't as long so you won't forget everything over the long break. I think schools in warmer climates have done this because it's still pretty much summer even in something like April.
Need more info! What was the increase in hours per year spent in class on average with year round school? What if we had year round school but kept the average hours per year spent in class the same as now. We could have a whole month off in December like colleges. A month off in summer and two weeks off for spring break and perhaps a fall break as well. Then either have 4 day weeks or shorter days to get the average hours spent in class per year down to 900 as we have now. That way students don't lose all that knowledge from being out of class for 3 months. I can tell you how many class at the start of a semester or even topics have to review old material before starting the new stuff cause students forgot. Also if there were shorter days but still 5 days a week class students would have more outside the classroom time to study if they need it, after school activities (sports/clubs) or even a job if they want money and can handle the work load along with their education. As well as plenty of time each day for relaxation and fun.
Hell, at the Academy I went to, I attended classes three days of any given week, and often would have an equivalent of three months off. Homeschooling was very well supported, and often worked for the better.
It's not the hours teaching that counts it's the quality of teaching that counts . A teacher that can enthuse and interests the students , that's what really counts . That is the real skill in teaching !
In Ontario, elementary and high school students get 2 months off ( July and August). University and College students get 4 months off (May, June, July and August).
My state Michigan is pretty low on the rankings for best education for a state. Detroit has an awful schooling system that destroyed our ranking. I go to a charter school called Achieve Charter Academy that is a k-8 school. We are ranked first in state for both middle and elementary schools. We average to be about a year and a half a head of our local public schools ( who also happen to be one of the best districts in state). The advanced math class is an additional 1.5 years ahead of that. Not to mention that my 6th grade Curriculum is more advanced than the junior year at a neighboring district. Relevance? We are an NHA school so they take 10% of funds to our school to build new schools. We don’t have the same budget but we still have many sports for both genders and 24 chrome books a grade. At what cost? Teacher’s salary. Our teachers suffer the loss but for a safer and easier work environment, No Retirement.
I actually support year round education but not more hours in school. You can do this by shortening the summer break and extend winter and spring break. This would be a trimester style schedule. The continuing education/ overwork problem can be solved by instituting a forced leave policy every year to year and a half. The issue is not just number of instruction hours but also time for remedial education, diverting poorer students from the bad element during the summer when crime is peaking (not everyone has money to go on vacations during the summer). Not to mention a summer session would be useful to immediately apply standardize testing result to remedial education. So yes this raises valid points against the year long school year but doesn't really look at why the other reasons why the policy has merit. The focus is should not just be what the teachers prefer or what the parents want, but what the students need. The opinions provided are completely one sided here even with the acknowledgement that it is a simplification.
i've hated school ever since i was 6 years old. Most subjects don't interest me at all and do not prepare me for the future. (math for example,i don't need anything but the basics for what i want to do later.) When i was 11 and our class laughed when there was something in our books related to sex,the teachers would always say ''stop being so childish'' well what do you expect?11 year olds have to be adults now? the point of school and college is to prepare you for working 9 to 5 (dolly parton reference hehe) Life should be spent living,and working morning to evening is not living,unless you really like your job (and most people dont like their job) I'm scared for the future,as simply going to school and doing my homework is too much for me.. it's already driving me into exhaustion and depression i hope i can find a job in the future that's part time and pays enough for me to live comfortably. The school/work system needs some serious changes but they will probaly never be implemented,or atleast not until im dead
In Canada it is actually fun to go to school because our teacher lets us do science experiments and do something called passions where we get to research anything we like, even video games
My english teacher says "because the school cant afford air conditioning its easier to just give them time off" she said thats the new reason as to why we do it, since theres so little agriculture now. Highschool in chicago so its a urban area
Yeah, I dislike the idea of Year-round school. As a 15-year-old, having to deal with AP/Pre-AP classes would be extremely stressful, not to mention that it would be awkward to transition from grade to grade with only a week or so in between. It would also be difficult for some extracurricular activities, (namely band and color guard), that use Summer as a time to help teach and begin working on activities for the year, to do what they need to do while not interfering with regular school hours. I like having the summers to just laze around and recuperate for the upcoming school year; and it's a more refreshing transition from grade to grade. I actually feel like I've closed off a chapter of my life, and that is somehow very healing to me mentally. Anyway, that's just my input, but I hope that they don't go through with changing to a year-round school year.
Ready to watch another fun fact video? Then check out this video and find out Why School Buses Are Yellow and Why They Don’t Typically Have Seatbelts:
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I remember when I changed schools from Arizona to Alabama they used the year round system. Instead of getting 2-3 days here and there and a massive three month blob in the middle you get a shorter summer but longer breaks elsewhere. It really made it much easier to learn as well as plan for vacations during other time periods.
Also to address the student learning... kids need more time with their teachers and less time focusing on testing. I'm atrocious at math because when I was in school it wasn't about learning the material but rather "testing". If someone had explained to me how to do it ... I might be in a much better place.
You're so right. The standardised testing is cutting into time better spent learning. The crippling "No child left behind" and main streaming challenged kids pushes kids forward who are not ready and they lag behind further while teachers are busy babysitting kids that are taking her time from students that have more potential.
scarletfluerr Oh I absolutely despise the "no child left behind" as it's utter bullshit. I can't entirely blame the teachers but I was a child that obviously never got the help he needed. Instead of learning the material I was passed long till my current state. I know I still need help if I ever go back to college but it's emberassing to admit how much.
Math is fun!
although I kinda wish I could do it in English...
who cares it is easier to understand in my home language anyway
Arcamean you are exactly right about this. It's the same way with politics, the politicians are always focused on getting elected and hardly thinking about actually getting things done. I wish schools had 4 tests per semester instead of the 8-12 we get now.
Arcamean That is so true, with the new syllabus system introduced in my country the teachers are stressing out because they are worried they won't be able to teach all the work for that term, so basically what that means is the teachers are so focused on getting the work done that's supposed to be done for the test and that leaves no time in carefully explaining the work and making sure the students actually know and understand it
More hours = More stress = Less effort that gets put in
Nope. More time = more opportunity for thorough instruction = superior performance = better life as adults.
Most people in my city don't even want to be there, so grades here are awful.
wholeNwon Incorrect in curtain parts of the country, In my state, Schools are from 7 to 3, Do they teach you any basic out door survival? How to do your taxes, How to get a job, You know, The basics? The sun goes down around 3-4pm here this time of year, And instead of being outside, They end up inside, Doing another 2-3 hours of homework already on top of the 8 hour school day, Don't forget house chores and what not, Where is your free time? To play with friends or work, on your hobbies? School is already taking a large chunk out of a KID's life, What ever happened to being active and having a couple hours of fun? We spend 8 hours locked in a building learning common core and what happened to London in 1666, Instead of REAL education such as survival skills and how to build a resume, What to bring with you if you decide to go outdoors, They don't teach you that stuff, Many teenagers get lost on what they thought was going to be a quick hike because they were unprepared, When asked, What is their answer? "I didn't know", Why go to school and not learn at least the most basic's of survival? Just my two cents.
Now before you hit me with a "That is what parents are for"
1: That is what schools are for, To teach children because parents are too busy with work, If that is what parents are for, Why have schools at all?
2: Not everyone has educated parents
3: Not everyone has parents at all
+Nathan Zaremskiy I don't understand why there seems to be a problem. I attended public schools. Our day was from 8-3. We learned mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology, history, English, etc.
There were art and music classes, etc. There was time for lunch and a short recess outside. There were quizzes most weeks and big mid-terms and final exams. Yes, there was time for some outside activities before or after dinner, then homework. Much more time for fun with friends on weekends, especially in the winter. We all developed good social skills, many continued our educations through graduate school. I had no difficulty obtaining good employment. Yes, I can follow written directions and complete my own tax returns though, to be honest about it, I use a computer. When I have to deal with K1s complicated by reinvestment of distributions, I employ a CPA. One of the important things a child learns throughout the educational process is to perform to expectations and then to exceed those expectations. Hard work brings success in whatever endeavor one encounters. In our house, each of us had our roles to play to make the family a success for us all. Mine was to be a good student.
I can't speak for all of the states in the US, but my state of origin, Ohio, we have an issue which either few know about or that few want to even talk about. You said on average the US spends about $115,000.00 per student, unfortunately not as much of that goes into the schools as you might think. Every year the Ohio State Board of Education puts an issue on the ballots for the citizens in the city to vote on to raise property taxes to give the school system more money, and when that passes, the schools don't get much of that, instead the members of the Board of Education give themselves raises, in fact the pervious head of the Ohio State Board of Education makes more than the state's governor. And if the school board doesn't get their issue passed then they cut programs from the schools so they can then turn around and give themselves raises, so the issue, in Ohio at least, is politicians using their positions as a Get-Rich-Quick scheme instead of serving the public as they are supposed to do.
If this is going on in Ohio, it wouldn't surprise me if it were happening in other states too, and that would definitely explain why the US doesn't do as well as other countries that spend less per student than the US does.
Also, every year the school board has kids take tests to compare how the students are doing against students from other states and other countries, and when they find out that they aren't doing as well they make it look like they are by lowering graduation standards so that more students can graduate, so on paper it looks like they fixed the issue, but in reality all they are doing is dumbing down the students.
The same thing happened in our state.
It's very difficult for students to excel when their teachers are deficient.
There is a video on UA-cam by Dan Rather which investigates the corruption within the Detroit school system. Surprise surprise money is going to hiring staff that do nothing, non-existent textbooks and of luxuries for members of the board...
Welcome to America. The evils of human nature are universal. It's why we need to be governed.
I can answer that: Kids need time to be kids, not mindless worker robots. And Summer is awesome! It's the best season for having fun, unlike that horrible cold gloomy depressing _other_ season.
i prefer spring and fall, its not painfully hot like summer and it doenst feel like your nose/ears/insertbodyparthere will fall off from the cold
i love the sun, but I prefer to enjoy it in spring.
Honestly, I would have preferred long winter breaks when I was in school. Summer weather is miserable.
I love winter I would much rather have the long break then
Little Raindrop exactly
entire summer? i wish that happened lol 3 month holiday would be great
Darkedor And the students who actually learned the stuff rather than memorize for tests picked everything back up within 3 weeks.
Nixinova ours are usually only around 2.5 months at most.
I only get 6 weeks
Same here in California. Some nutter decided to get rid of August vacation and give kids half of spring off instead. Makes no sense. It is still cold in spring and most families vacation in August when parents get time off.
Nixinova I live in US we dont get 3 months we get 2 months
How about : kids need a damn break and some people like to get summer jobs.
Try "some people have to get summer jobs". Without prior work experience, you're not going to get anywhere in this job market.
Alexander Abrams-Flohr really? What experience do you need to work at market basket or convenience store?
chistine lane
have you been paying attention to jobs versus students ratio? It's hard to get jobs because you have hundreds of applicants for only one job. school takes so much time out of a student's life due to increasing competitiveness for acceptance into university.. There isn't as much time for kids to get their work experience as checkout chicks during their schooling years anymore, and that means that when they do have time to search for a job without school pressures on them (ie. summer break), their inexperience is going against thousands of other kids who are also having their summer break at the same time. Market gets flooded with labour, and the youngest kids (14-15) are the ones soaking up the unskilled work because they don't have to be paid a minimum wage. Without work experience, you may as well not bother (especially because firms don't want to train/induct young workers who are just going to leave the job at the end of summer two months ahead). Summer also is the time when no one is hiring.. Especially if you live in Southern Hemisphere where summer coincides with Christmas (all hiring is done well before summer break even starts to prep for Christmas sales)
chistine lane Damn. You do research. Not even I would read all that.
Robert Phillips lucky one Britain we get a month and a half, when does your brake start?
Honestly, more hours in school = stress and anxiety = less will to learn = less learning.
FrostyWolfZ true ,I hate school because I get stressed and it's so long . I'm separated from my family for so many hours to where we can't spend time together as much
FrostyWolfZ Unless you can somehow make it less stressful.
FrostyWolfZ Well to that I say ain't nobody got time for that I'm gonna go to lifenoggin learn more than Finlands 608 hours and put that into a WEEK AND ALL IT TAKES IS A COUPLE SEARCHS First living thing in orbit СССР Name Lakia Gender Female Lifeform dog First Satellite in orbit СССР Sputnik 1 2nd satellite in space СССР A couple months later they send the second satellite with Lakia Name of object Sputnik 2 EVEN FIRST MAN IN SPACE AND FIRST ORBITING LAB! how in the world can СССР Afford that!? on the other hand First living man on moon go's to America and 2nd space lab
Don't you dare take summer away!
AtOutoftheBlue well it got longer+Obama sucks+Hillary sucks well in my county
WE NOT DEAD YET Lets just hppe Trump will makes us great again like he said.
J Moore You must be at a real low point in life when you're putting your faith on Trump
@@jrobi501 No amount of your school winning trophies is going to change your status of being a D student.
@@questworldmatrix XD lol i was trolling
when the teachers have to teach just to give test after test all in the name of keeping up with other countries aka Common Core then its no wonder why students don't learn information
No, it's not to "keep up with other countries". It's to determine whether the teachers are earning their salaries and actually doing what they are supposed to be doing. Deficient teachers = deficient students.
True, though it's more an issue of testing for the sake of testing rather than testing to evaluate what a student knows. Standardizes tests are nice and wonderful because they are easy to grade and easy to compare, but they do a horrible job of actually showing what a student knows. I work in Asia, and I have students who consistently get 90 or 100 percent on an English tests yet can't tell me how they are or answer other simple questions.
I've taken thousands of tests in my life and every one of them examined what I knew. None were for "the sake of testing", whatever that means. If, as you say, English tests in your area fail to discover language deficiencies then they aren't properly constructed and the curricula/teachers are of poor quality.
wholeNwon That is the whole problem with testing; they absolutely aren't being constructed correctly.
The school I teach at isn't unique. This is a problem at least in North America and all across Asia. 5 minutes on Google will tell you that. I got 80's all through school in math, yet can't divide and struggle with fractions. I got poor marks in English (lit) and Social Studies through secondary school, yet those proved to be my strongest university subjects when I am given personal evaluation rather than a standardized test. The reason for this is simple; tests in secondary school are about cramming and rubber stamping knowledge so that the teacher can move on, not about evaluating what a student actually knows.
The whole point of test taking is to standardize evaluation, but that immediately removes individual evaluation and focuses only on cramming instead of internalizing what was learned. Of the thousands of tests you took, I guarantee that nearly every one was about cramming knowledge so that you could move onto the next test.
That's a paradox. How can the reason we're doing badly by the "common core" standard of measuring success be teaching kids to pass the "common core test" rather than doing some other thing that some people think is better.
More hours isn't what our schools need. Teaching them more practical information and not overloading them with absurd amounts of homework needs to be implemented.
Finland's system is good becasue they have 608 hours of teaching, not mindless rambling of teachers who dont teach.
I think I would kill myself if the school year was year round
I think a lot of students, including me, would agree with you. I remember students looking forward to summer vacation, even at the beginning of the school year. If school was year round, what would these students have to look forward to?
+The Pyro Gamer how about if I changed it up a bit and said we are gonna have no summer but instead you go to school at 9am and come back at 1pm, you will get a summer break of a week, a fall break of a week for thanksgiving, a winter break of 2 weeks for winter, and a spring break of a week. And the rest of the days will be used to fill in the amount of time taken from shortening school hours.
Poison Ice Blade
that would be great.
They would not know of the summer break and therefore not yearn for it. To them going to school year round would be normal.
You'll need to get used to it when you leave school and get into the real world.
you have to make the teachers in the US schools care before you can make the students care. and then, maybe America will break top 10 again
Professor Oak rather you must get children couple ticks up in Maslov scale. There is nothing teacher can do, if the student spends all their brain power thinking about "do I have food when I get home" "do I have home next week" "do I get attacked today" "do we have heat electricity and water in our home".
first step in student education is student welfare and well-being. this is the concern of the WHOLE society, if education is seen as the concern of whole society. when welfare is taken care of we can start to talk about student motivation, teacher quality, teaching methods, evaluations. Note well feeling students typically have higher motivation.
if basic welfare is not taken care of everything spent on educating the student is wasted, because the student is spending their energy on more imminent and important things, like staying alive and healthy. Which means social security is part of education. well fed, healthy and relaxed students learn better.
Professor Oak HÄÄHÄÄ Im on top 3
I live in Australia so summer holidays means nothing and we have summer as school
Couldn't say it any better. Parent involvement and leadership is severely underrated as part of a students "education".
i prefer a school that sends the children year round except for 1 day on major holidays. i would pay for dorms to not have to worry about the kids. I have to make a living, teachers need to teach and parents need to earn income. simple...
If you cut the crap from a school year you'd only been in school 300 hours a year.
Yeah because focusing on three topics is great for creating a well balanced society
krim7 How has that worked for us so far?
+krim7 yeah but you will NEVER need history unless you get a job as a teacher or a historian which in that case then you need to know better than what school teaches you
What exactly does one have to learn to make an animal a man and then to make a man a civilized man...one who can contribute to making our human societies better for all? I suspect each of those stages requires increasingly more educational development. One can choose to live as little more than a brutish animal capable of ingesting food, eliminating waste and occasionally reproducing.
Or one can choose a different, more emotionally rewarding life that accompanies a broad education.
Clearly we need english to teach that Maths is plural. No need for p.e.
I would say English, Maths, Science, Computing, and an option to do some physical subject like engineering, design, music, etc, and critical thinking classes. Couple of hours a week of each, get it done in a couple of days. Heck, make it 2.5 hours each and cut the homework, and make it the schools responsibility.
I like how teachers would say they want their children to have better education and whats best for them but they treat their students very badly( the bad ones, not everyone) you know what i'm talking about
I was unlucky to have an algebra teacher that was like that. Stubborn as a mule and utterly incompetent in what she is supposed to do. Just about everyone who went to her class hated her and most of our grades are on the verge of failing. It became actually so bad that one my friends literally had to drop out for a semester because the stress of being put through the GPA deathmarch of a class is actually affecting her health.
zchen27 yea
Yeah. There is this kid named James in my class who got treated terribly because he usually and even when he had something good to say, the teahcer would say, "Too late. We're switching subjects." literally everyone hated her. Me too, her rules and punishments were too harsh for just mere talking or not completeting work in time.
bmorebruh Most teachers (public school) are assholes. English teachers are usually freaks. Math teachers usually don't have common sense, they only know math. However; my second math professor in college was one of the best teachers I have ever had. I hated math until I had her class. Some people just aren't meant to be teachers, there usually doing it for the perks.
Sebastian_69 Most English teachers are actually really cool. Most of them actually know what anime is.
As a senior in high school I wish we had shorter but more frequent breaks. A two month summer is longer than anyone needs it to be and just means that by September we've forgotten everything. Take 3 weeks off of summer and give us a fall break, another spring break, etc.
Just like the difference between urban and rural schools. Money and time are not the most important. It’s about how it’s taught and the willingness of students to learn. For years K-7 I always came home and answered “it sucked” to how was school. It wasn’t until the 8th grade that I realized I enjoyed school.
Yes. Definitely. Facial hair and glasses are favored.
Fo sho.
I can tell you from experience that the more time I spent in school, the more burnt out and less motivated I became, and thus the lower my grades where. It was always refreshing to leave for a few months and head back to school ready to learn again.
dont people ever consider life? all year schooling? shouldn't kids get to enjoy their lives? shouldnt both kids and adults get more freetime? the school/work week should be 2 or 3 days at most and adults should get summer vacation too. sure, productivity would drop but fuck productivity. even with the changes i mentioned above in developed countries productivity still would not drop so low as to not afford food which is really the only thing that really is necessary to live.
What a nice dream, but imposible. So many of your favourite services would not be posible, if adults would have sumer vacations and 2 or 3 days of work. Think about doctors, policemans, maintance of internet etc.
Rexo Was that sarcasm?
Rexo Well, no one can really stop from working more.... you could work 16 h/day 7 days a week if you want to. IT's working less that's the problem.
If you're an adult there's nothing stopping you from working 2-3 days a week as a part time job. See how much money you have for living expenses.
tmnsoon Let's say you need 2000 units of some curency for the desired lifestyle. There are people that make 4000, 5000, or even more units. But they are not the kind of jobs that can be part time. These are high wages after years of developing a career. You may have started out at 1000 or 2000, but after many years you reach 4000 or 5000 or more. Can you now switch to part time? You are so productive you can make 4000 or more for 40 hours of work. In 20 hours you should be capable of producing 2000. So you can have a good life style for half the money. That is how it should be, but it isn't because the only jobs that are available part time are the same jobs who are already low wage, fast food work, or something like that. Or maybe you can have a normal job, say maybe as a programmer, that can in theory also be aprt time. But will get any prmotions? Benefits? THAT's what i'm talking about! This is why SOCIETY must change. You can work part time but you CANNOT get a promotion part time or have any benefits like holidays. Of course if you have half a low wage you can't live off the money, but you could live off half a high wage. But no one allows that and that's not fair. LEt's say I make 2000 units as an employee and i;m a stelar employee, and the boss say hey, i'm giving you a prmotion. You can now get 3000. Another X maunt of time passes and he says here's another prmotion and you now get 4000... Can you say to your bos, "Wellm actually, if you really want to reward me for my hard work, I don't really want mre money. I like my current lifestyle. But I have too litle free time. Could you instead let me work 20 h for 2000 units?", could you? IDK, maybe you could, as far as i know, you can't.
I grew up in Northern Maine and we actually had some time off in the fall to work the fields to help with the harvest. We still had the summer off and we would go to school for a few weeks in August, have September and some of October off. We would not have summer break until mid June. This has changed somewhat now because of mechanized farming.
Another important factor to consider is that in the US, high school is MANDATORY until you turn 18, where in a lot of countries it's something you have to test in to, with those who don't make it going to technical school to learn a trade instead, so PISA's statistics are essentially comparing ALL american students to just the college-bound portion of students of the rest the world.
IONATVS Exactly. The high achieving (college bound, ........ no ACTUAL college bound not Starbucks training known as Poli-Sci) rank within East Asian countries.
+king_ Tesseract
College?
In South Africa, highschool is mandatory until the age of 16(about grade 9 or 10) and after highschool you normally go off to university if you achieve good marks at the end of your matrix year (grade 12), the philosophy I have is that you need a degree in something, like accounting or your doomed...
IONATVS clearly has no idea what he's talking about they tested these students at the age of 15 and highschool is mandatory almost everywhere until 16-17
Well there is a sort of bias in these statistics, but I would not argue it is because of mandatory schooling. There is a geographical bias that might have an effect on results. While the United States wants every region (urban, suburban, rural, rich, poor, public, private) to participate, other nations might only administer the tests in schools in areas that are more likely to score higher. That's why the first place usually goes to an urban area of China, not China as a whole.
Okay, doing some more research it appears I had had this effect over-emphasized to me. It USED to be a common practice to have technical schools replace upper secondary education for non-collegebound students in many parts of the world, but most of these changed their minds somewhere in the middle of the last century and made upper-secondary compulsory for everyone, with tech schools instead replacing POST-secondary schooling. There are still a surprising number of countries that don't require education after 14 or 15, (or don't have compulsory education laws at all) but most of them are not ahead of the US in this study
We are taught Pre-Calculus as soon as ninth-grade and have to write a seven-paragraph, A3-sized essay about four lines of poem, answer five short questions (which aren't short at all), solve a bunch of x and y in tediously tricky equations using Viète theorem and prove a line which have virtually little relation to one other drawn in a triangle inscribed in a circle half the length of the latter just to gain entrance to tenth-grade (high school); in the meanwhile, tenth-graders in America are being taught in a triangle a+b
The principal (pun intended) reason given for favoring year round schools is to maximize the use of the BUILDINGS, because in theory, adding an extra 30+ percent of hours to the building usage would mean the ability to educate, on average, 30+ percent more students with the same number of buildings. However, there are other ways to keep the buildings active, such as holding community education classes and voluntary (if you don't want to stay in 5th grade next year) tutoring sessions. And besides, students would have to spend part of their school year in different buildings in order to eliminate building "waste."
Since technology makes self-education easier (Kahn Academy, Great Courses, Coursera, and web sites like this one), it might be better for students to have SHORTER classroom hours, during which they would do most of their "homework" exercises while the instructor is available to help immediately, rather than the next day, and make the reading of chapters in lieu of listening to lectures (or for students who prefer it, they could listen to recorded lectures at home), with the class time spent answering questions about the reading homework, then doing the homework "drills" in class.
And with so much of our school cost consisting of school board office "palaces," we could cut those funds, move administration to more modest offices in less expensive areas of town, and put the money into "no child left offline" equipment and internet services (school-owned laptops and tablets would have tamper proof security firmware, and the law could impose especially stiff punishment for stealing THOSE devices; students whose families could provide equipment would be eligible for free internet access on the school network, in addition to the internet connections their families could provide).
Tamper proof security firmware does not exist, and the theft of equipment is a serious problem when you realise you are giving it to vulnerable children. Even worse you propose to give this equipment to children from poor families who are more likely to live in dangerous areas. and can't afford transport to get them home safely.
Homework is dying out.
Precisely. I currently am attending a school in which we have no homework. This DOES come with a drawback though, my average time in school is about from 8.15 am to 3 pm. While my brother, going to high school is actually spending less time in school than me, in middle school. However, i highly like this approach, as having homework seriously lowers my happiness level and morale. Homework is ONLY given out if you cannot finish your school task, which is always possible to do in school, IF you focus while you are there and do your assignments. I have indeed went to a school in Croatia in which i have homework, and the huge difference there is that we always end at 1.30 pm, which is way shorter than in Sweden, where i am currently. But we did get a TON of homework, which definitely lowers one's happiness level.
Allan Richardson schools dont pay anything in my country,water and power are payed by the government,there are no taxes for school buildings and the students must buy books.
Boggy Bolt hmm.. im in u.s... when i was in high school.. i went from 8 to 3.. AND had honework
The big reason for a push to year-round school is the amount of progress the students lose over a long break. This is most true for subjects like math and reading (where regular practice is important) and for impoverished students (whose parents are least likely to have time to work with them over the summer). a better system might be to spread the break out into pieces, (e.g. 2 weeks on, one week break) but keep the same the number of hours the same.
The school breaks have nothing to do with giving students a break. It's the TEACHERS that need a break. If teachers had to deal with annoying kids (all children besides your own are annoying) they would go insane and start killing them.
Especially in "open carry" states where the teachers are armed "in order to defend the students."
Allan Richardson
This has nothing to do with gun control.
Allan Richardson just by that comment I know you're an anti-gun, anti-Trump, snowflake who wanted Hillary elected. Sorry not sorry
Year around was amazing for me(grades 4th-12 in southern california). No summer slide where you forgot how to do long division or something fairly technical. Another vacation just 3 months after returning to look forward to and not getting bored with 3 months of being a kid with no money or transportation generally. I'm amazed to hear anyone would ever go back to the traditional schedule
I think that in the U.S., we have a very relaxed belief about education within each family. You go to school cause "why not," and not necessarily because it's good for you.
In other cultures, school and education are much more highly valued. And as for math, some languages are just better at doing math than English. I've heard that Mandarin's way of naming numbers helps them do math better; there aren't any bizarre rules, such as having numbers called "eleven" that make no sense, since it should be called "tenandone."
the anti intellectualism in the US is probably more to blame than the english language
Epyrian try 70 and onwards in French, maybe you won't find 11 that weird then...
Avdhoot Kulkarni Oh, French sucks, too--as do all the European languages.
But, again, that's not the main reason why we're falling behind in the U.S. It's our dislike of education and the fact that we teach those bad values to our kids that causes them not to do well in school.
That is, of course, different from family to family; however, overall in the U.S. most families don't see education as important, relative to northern Europeans or Asians.
Epyrian yeah in mandarin the number make a lot more sense. Like eleven is 十一 which would literally translate to ten one. Thirty four would be 三十四 or three ten four. Their months and days are also numbered instead of given names. Monday is 星期一 or 1st of the week, basically. December is 十二月 or ten two month/twelve month.
Em Yeah... in English the months are really confusing. The most confusing months for me are september to december, because september literally means "seventh month," but today it's the 9th month. They've all shifted by 2.
I think the least we can do in the U.S. is adopt the scientific METRIC system, and stop using the Neanderthalic "imperial" system.
Person A: How far away from here is the store?
Person B: It's about 100 of my feet.
Really? We're using hands and feet to measure things still in 2016?
I attended a year-round school for a year or so while living in Florida. It was....interesting to say the least. Most weekends were 3 day weekends so we had more time during the week to play/relax. The downside is there was obviously no big chunk of time to do the vacation thing.
US math scores would probably improve if they did away with the "Common Core" system of teaching, if students were taught to actually think instead of reaching for a calculator, and teachers actually cared about the kids learning rather than just being able to pass state mandated tests.
I think all students should be given a calculator on tests, no point in learning how to do basic operations manually. Many of my math teachers even allowed us to use computers/math engines.
What is important is understanding the math, remembering how to take a derivative is useless when you can have a computer do it, but being comfortable enough with math to use it in everyday situations is something I rarely see and is really the most valuable thing you can get out of a math education
The problem is not common core is bad. The idea of common core is to focus on critical thinking. The problem is that a majority of teachers don't care about the reasoning and logic, and opt to teach memorization.
Corky Schillinger what math class did you not need a calculator for I can't do calculus without that shit.
Actually, when I went to high school, calculators were primitive. To do Calculus, we needed a manual slide rule and a whole lot of #2 pencils, graph paper, and regular ruled paper. Calculators weren't permitted until college.
I taught at a year-round school for 2 years. We taught the same number of days as traditional schools, just with 3 weeks between quarters and a VERY short summer break. Between the incompetence of planners (no AC in July and August) and the fact that no one break was long enough to decompress, I was at the end of my rope. So were the students, but they didn't have any choice... I got the heck out; they stayed.
My country has no seasons, what does summer feels like?
i wonder if people from africa get heat stroke or just westerners during summer?
Kalvin Castro Singapore, it's basically sunny and hot all year round, somewhere around 30 plus degree Celsius
+Jesmin Manna I was born in the Summer but I agree with you, lol.
Jordan Wells glad to see someone agreeing with me.
I was born in winter, but I'll take 90 degrees over 40 any day. Even in a humid place, and even at work (with no air conditioning).
Living and studying to become an educator (currently a substitute teacher) in NYC, I can see benefits outside of academic progress for a year-round school system (I specify my location as I know that the demographics and concerns are different here than elsewhere). A lot of children have parents who work year-round without means to have child care for the summer months so it could keep children safe and "off the streets" for lack of a better phrase. What I think would work best is a system of shorter days (for instance 8am-1pm) with intermittent 2 week-long breaks (say every 8 weeks or so with a possible longer break in August, the hottest of the summer months). There would still be after school programs offered to students who have parents who work (they typically operate until 6pm) and even if funding can not allow such a long free after school program, it significantly reduces the amount of time a student has without adult supervision since they will not have the typical 2 1/2-3 months during the summer. It would also make child care more feasible for parents as they only have to fund a few week's long supplement spread throughout the year instead of a cluster of months in a few pay-periods. It would also give educators more time to teach subjects which, because of the standardized testing in place now, is lacking for true learning and exploration. And of course, it would keep children's brains engaged more consistently as having such long breaks between acquiring new information in a school setting can greatly affect their performance.
you and thoughty2 should do a collab
Interesting. I grew up in Brooklyn, NY and had to do summer school once. The heat was just unbearable with no A/C. That alone was enough to keep me from having failing grades in the future.
In New Zealand we only have 6 weeks off....
Travis Dunningham I'm so sorry for you
Theycallmecurlie
Although we do have an extra 6 spread out through the year,
Theycallmecurlie How many kids would actually feel the difference between the 11 weeks they get off now to 6? After just a few weeks the students will lose count.
Same problem here in the Netherlands, only 6 weeks.
Travis Dunningham We got 8 in the philipines
Another major issue with year round school is continually differed maintenance on school buildings and equipment. It's obviously hard to to major maintenance (roof repair, HVAC, etc.) when the school is full of students, so normally this is done in the summer.
When California experimented with their year-round schedules a lot of schools fell into fairly heavy disrepair. MY high school (norther CA late 80's) was year round, not to add instruction hours but to add more students, with the students cross-tracked in order to pack 30% more students into the existing buildings.
In America, schools are funded through property taxes in their district. This is why more money is spent per student in wealthier schools, while poorer students lose out.
You need to remember, our teachers are paid exorbitant salaries, at least here in Pa., and this adds to the total cost of one child's education. I'm not sure if the rest of the country is held hostage by teachers unions, but, I believe if we could lower salaries, spend more on actually educating the kids and end tenure, so we could weed out bad teachers, we might have a shot at coming in higher than 36.
TheDajamster that's how it's done everywhere. But we don't put all our poor people in one area because we aren't Trump electing morons.
teachers unions aren't in every state, like in Fla. Here teachers are one of the lowest paying job class in the state.
KitsuneRogue which is wrong, hence why we need teachers unions. You shouldn't earn more managing shelf stockers at a supermarket than a educated teacher. They work with everyone's least favourite people, children. And they educate the next generation, arguably the most important job in the world. The poster doesn't know what he's talking about, teachers educate children.
(TheDajamster) I agree, I've seen it while in public school. In my town, average income is higher and school taxes are pretty exorbitant (on average equal to private school tuition). While in the inner city areas, funding is extremely low and schools have problems even buying basic equipment.
Also it does not help that disparities in teacher salaries further widen the funding gap. Because of high crime rates in poorer areas, the only way to attract well-educated teachers is to offer more benefits/pay. Nicer areas do not need to do this; I once questioned a representative from a teachers union and they said safer, richer districts actually pay teachers less money in exchange for the area's greater security.
Funding public schools through district property taxes clearly does not work on a whole because there is definitely segregation based on socioeconomic status.
Actually in certain states where you grow things like watermelon and musk melon kids were needed in the summer months for harvesting. In Arkansas, the last of that harvest usually happens at the end of July or the start of August. We are still an agri country in a lot of ways. Our local schools usually give kids off the first day of deer season because they aren't going to be there anyway. During planting season
Isn't America one of the few countries that put all students of the same age into one room with different education lvls and expects them to learn the same way?
Bobby S I'm telling your teacher that you're cheating. smh how do I reach these kids
No, they don't expect them to learn anything. The whole purpose is to drag the majority down to a low level so that the kids of the wealthy face less competition.
Icy Dice No the UK does the same. Unless you are SEN, you are in the same class as other kids your age. Although in my primary school there were different colour groups for each ability level. Each group had their own table. Green was the highest, yellow was the lowest (focus group).
Icy Dice ...?? Separating students by age is something that happens in literally the entire world.
Icy Dice that system in my opinion is better imagine if you put a 16year old in a 1st grade class would not that kid be suicidal
it is not only about farms, cattle still need to be kept year round, spring was roundup time (after the birthing) and needed to bring the cattle to market. which lasted for several months where kids were not typically needed that much in roundup but needed for the drive itself, were boys kept the ramada, and still today in cattle states where school year are a little shorter than most places, what they did in new york city might not what they did (even teach the same thing) in texas, or montana
It's largely cultural. Sad as it is, younger kids face a degree of shaming in western nations for enjoying academia. That's instilling a mindset in students that it's not okay to pursue and enjoy learning. This phenomenon doesn't appear to be as prevalent in Asia. I'm not saying it's the be-all and end-all, but it certainly must play a role.
I agree with what you say about kids in the US being kind of bullied for liking school, but I wouldn't be so quick to say that it's the opposite in Asia. We tend to get the idea that Asians are super humans who are awesome at school, when that isn't really the case. Asian kids are really not that much different from American kids. The real difference is the pressure they receive from their parents to succeed in school. And I feel that this is also a problem which has resulted in Japan and Korea's problem with high teen suicide rates. So it's not so much that Asian students LIKE to study, it's that they have more societal pressure to succeed academically.
Really? Maybe it is just my parents but i actually got a game dev job. and my dad became a pumpkin breeder, warehouse manager, tile installer and pumpkin farmer. All of those are hard to do and require a lot of intelligence, and i do not mean to brag but it is true because working at mcdonalds is not that hard.
Also from what i've heard, in several Asian countries like China AS I UNDERSTAND IT. If you suck at school, your basically given up on. Like they don't allow for middling, plodding along students. Either your doing great or your out, the state won't actually let you keep going if you aren't good at it.
Don Ziolkowski I'm not so sure about schooling in China, so that could be true for all I know. But it's not like that in Korea. In Korea there is also a lot of pressure on the teachers to make sure that the kids do well. So when I had students who were falling behind I was told to hound them more until they started improving. I never heard of students being left behind or given up on, which isn't to say that it can't or doesn't happen, just that it's not the norm in the case of South Korea. The most that will happen if you're not such a good student is that you will have a harder time getting into better schools in the future, which is not just for college, but also middle and high school. And I've heard that it's really important that you get into the best college possible if you want to have a better chance of getting a good job in the future because of all the fierce competition.
Don Ziolkowski wouw.. Here in Finland we really never leave a kid behind.
My kids were in what was called " year round school" for a few years when we lived in KY and they got out of school for what felt as more than they had previously when it wasn't year round and still got 2 months off for summer. I believe the cost of running a school and heating and cooling it is why it wasn't truly year round. We lived out in the country and the school they went to was kind of small but also really good in winning awards. But while my gifted daughter sailed through school effortlessly even in her advanced classes, my son, who isn't learning impaired but does learn much differently than most other kids, fell behind but they passed him through anyway, not knowing how to deal with him and to this day at 13 doesn't know the basics to math and thus can't grasp an understanding of the harder stuff. The school passed him through preschool all the way to 4th grade without even knowing the difference between a dime and a nickel, which astounded us when we found this out a few years ago. We moved states to TN to a school that was supposed to be very good in order to help him but to no avail. He shows Autistic traits but very high functioning and is a brilliant artist. Most things he learns, he learns from me and not school. I feel that the 3 month break each summer can stunt many children if they don't continue studies outside of school and keep their minds in a learning framework.
year around education sounds like such a terrible idea.
Mara Henao 1st Angers kids 2nd kids riot 3rd kids kill teachers 4th kids tell parents I just killed 7 people because school got year round 5th kids kill the people who made it happen
WE NOT DEAD YET. BUT WE WILL BE IF YOU STILL EXIST.
I think multiple short breaks around the year wouldn't break the kids' school routine as much, thus making their learning more effective. With short breaks they don't forget as much as they would over the long break.
And I think that after a break the motivation is increased, so having more breaks could affect them positively in that way too.
WasWeiß Ich They don't study over those short breaks and diffenltly forget
SuperManBoy1 you don't forget that much in 2 weeks.
WasWeiß Ich You do I can tell you you do ask any American student and they would hardly be able to tell you what they learned 2 weeks ago
As a person who works in a school district, you are probably wrong. Everything gets jettisoned after Summer but only small bits are forgotten after the other three breaks.
SuperManBoy1 sad state of affairs really
If students in Singapore got summer breaks, there would be no school
I went to a year round school. I remember that my Kindergarten (1989-1990) was traditional and then 1-6 was year round (1990-1996). The school was divided into 4 tracks and at any given time (with the exception of a few key weeks) there would be 3 of the 4 tracks at school at any point in time. Every track would get periods of time off that were anywhere from a few weeks to 6 weeks. I remember my track had its big time off from around Thanksgiving to New Years. Everyone still went to school for the same amount of time and still had the same number of break days but it wasn't one 12 week break. The only vacations I remember taking that conflicted with the school schedule were actually during the late winter was for skiing.
I thought it was actually better as you had regular breaks rather than one long break. Its also a fairly effective way to have a school which can accommodate 300 students have a population of 400 students.
There was a bit of a transition to middle school which was the regular schedule. I remember in high school wanting to get rid of spring break and instead have 5 Fridays off in a row and even thought of adding a week at the beginning and end of the school year and adding an extra 8 Fridays off. So one out of every 3 weeks you got a Friday off.
school fucking sucks, how the fuck is it ok for me to know the difference between a sedimentary rock and a metamorphic rock but I dont know how to pay bills. Hell I would go so far to say I could learn everything I learned in school on the internet
Seriously, paying bills isn't that difficult -- you get the bill, and you pay it by the due date. What IS difficult is learning to budget your income to be able to pay those bills. AND to figure out what hourly rate times how many hours per week you need to be able to pay bills. Which is something that PARENTS should be teaching their children.
Year-round schooling is a misnomer (its not 365, 24/7). In Australia (where I'm from), we have four 10-week school terms and they are broken up by short seasonal breaks (2 weeks in autumn/fall, 2 weeks in winter and 2 weeks in spring) with a 6-week long break during summer.
*Moral of the story:* Education is fucked.
I remember my high school tried a thing, where they shortened the break in the summer, lengthened the break in the winter and everyone did half days with options to go down to the local college for a couple extra courses if they wanted. And well, we where preforming way better and the teachers wheren't too put off by it and it worked out in general, we still had the same amount of time, just more breaks here and there and the half day course work meant that students had more time to be kids and get rest while teachers didn't have to deal with as large of a class.
100% of students in Sweden are eligible for free lunch. Sweden must be a very impoverished country.
The US has a requirement that the parents of free-lunch eligible students be below the poverty line.
Exactly.
When they've said it in the video I thougt "Wait. So some of the childen are not allowed to eat in school? WTF?"
Here every one is eligible for lunch. It's not really free. But it's heavily subsidizes so it cost maybe 10 - 20% percent of what it would normaly cost. But every child/student can have that lunch.
Every student in the US has a lunch, whether you want one or not.
The difference is that more affluent families can pay the 2 dollars a day for the meal or send their kid with a bag lunch. The poor are subsidized to be given a free lunch.
There are also many programs and grants that give free breakfast as well.
krim7 why not just tax fund all the public school meals for all children. it would save tons of bureaucratic hassle. it must be a bureaucratic nightmare for school to figure out who does and doesn't need to pay.
Ari Takalo it really is a bad System, but it seems to be working
A huge issue with my school (& most if not all public schools in Australia) was what was called ‘teaching to the test’ - the short explanation is that our school was forced (through funding) to train us how to make good test scores, at the direct expense of our teachers being rendered unable to actually teach. The school’s funding was tied to how well the students scored on tests/exams, which meant that teachers had to spend a lot of time teaching us how to pass tests/exams rather than teaching the actual subjects (& yes, they are very different things) - each school year the time spent teaching to the test increased, until well over half of my final year was consumed by practice exams & being taught the various technical aspects of figuring out what the examiners were looking for & giving it to them. The end result is that while I couldn’t tell you much of anything about any of my core subjects, if you hand me a test on damn-near anything other than maths or languages I don’t speak & I’d get not far under a passing grade first time - give me a weekend with that year’s textbook & I’d knock it out of the park, hell, that’s how I passed all but one of my first-year university exams even after missing roughly 80% of lectures/classes due to health issues (the exception being when I had to dissect a cockroach, & thus couldn’t get around the technical instruction I’d missed). It’s a horrendous system that cripples students who can’t afford private teaching, & thoroughly destroys whatever desire the students may have had to learn, & it grinds to dust any passion, desire & even capacity that teachers have for teaching, leading to burnt-out teachers who then either disconnect entirely as a defence mechanism or slowly become bitter, resentful & vindictive. While a student I saw good teachers & students break completely under the pressure of the constant push for better scores at all costs, sometimes with tragic results. It’s obscene, & ultimately tests/exams (as they exist currently) don’t actually gauge how much a student has learnt, just how good they are at decoding what the examiner wants in a set timeframe.
1. China is rather well know for falsifying scores to make themselves look good.
2. I like the the way the German's do year round schooling. They go to school for a weeks or so and then get some time off, rinse and repeat.
LexieAssassin well firstly it is not China. it is shanghai. So "China" doesn't have a PISA score. City of Shangai has a PISA score. So factually we don't know what overall Chinese score is, because China as whole has newer been tested.
it ain't even cheating. Rather media constantly falsely reports that China has PISA score x, when it is fully openly reported in the testing that only Shanghai participated.
it is like testing NYC and then media saying USA has PISA score x. It might be representative, it might not. We simple don't know, because only NYC was tested. They would have to test elsewhere in USA to know for sure.
Ah, I see. Seems I misunderstood then.
2. Hm, this is a little too simplified. Of course we don't have some time off after one week, but the general principle is true (although vacation times vary from Bundesland to Bundesland). In Bavaria, it's something like this:
school starts around the 12th of September, 3rd of October is a holiday all over Germany, the first week of November is off ("fall vacation"), also on the 3rd Wednesday of November there is no school. Then we have vacation from Christmas eve to 6th of january, one week off usually on february (the week of Ash wednesday), two weeks around easter, two weeks starting from Pentecost and then 6 weeks in summer starting from the 1st of August (which is the "big" vacation between school years)
All in all this leads to the same amount of vacation, but spread more equally
Well, I'm not totally familiar with all of it, just how I remember hearing it back in my German classes back in high school.
LexieAssassin so you're not Austrian as I would have guessed from your profile picture?
Summer is generally seen as the only season that certain activities can be done. This not only applies to the kids and teachers, but the school itself. It allows for renovations to be done to schools during the summer break and in Canada those renos would be difficult in the winter. For junior/high school students summer is vital for work. If kids were kept from the workforce until graduation they would have difficulties later in life. If one was a fan of year round school a way it could work is via a system seen in the oilpatch/diamond mines. Where students would attend alternating. 2 weeks of class and 1 or 2 weeks off. That would minimise the "dumbing" effect of being out of class for 2 months and saving the 2 weeks wasted on review. having a week or 2 off every 2 weeks would still allow for vacations(year round) however would interfere with first jobs.
I wanna go to Finland... get smarter _and_ less school time? that's fucking deal
Sky Eye not getting smarter, just being more efficient. You see we start at age 7. According to research formal schooling before that is waste of resources and teaching time. The brain and mind simply aren't developed enough the learn in a formal fashion. Same with instruction time per day. Adding more teaching doesn't help, because brain doesn't have endless capability to focus and learn. it needs rest and breaks, otherwise teaching just goes in from one ear and out of the other.
sometimes less is more. Not because we Finns are idealists, but because research says that is how the human brain works and fighting against biology is pointless.
The most confusing thing is that US school years don't match up with calendar years.
Here in Australia School Starts about February, and ends in December, with starting later and finishing earlier occurring as you get into Grade 10, 11, 12.
It's much easier to manage and remember schooling years, as they start and end just like Calendar years.
I did my final year of schooling, Grade 12, in 2011.
PISA is a useless measure, because are most 15 year olds going to care about a test that doesn't affect them and just used for research?
Here in Australia, the year starts around the end of January and ends around early or mid December, in line with the calendar year. While that means that, yes, the schools here take a long break in our Summer just like America does in their's, I think following the calendar year just makes more sense in general. If the seasons don't matter so much, you'd be taking time off around the end of year holidays that way instead, a traditionally important time to go spend some times with relatives, etc. I don't think year round education is a solution for anything (the mind needs down time to process things and unwind if nothing else) but a year being a single year instead of strangely ovelapping 2 by half, really does make a lot more sense to me. Of course, I am biased though, being brought up with that as the norm. The only thing I can think of that's even vaguely similar to the American school year here is the financial year (which starts/ends somewhere around June). That has a reason though, in that it's a comparibly financially quieter time of year. If companies had to sort out their finances around the busiest time of year (the end of the year, Xmas), that's be hell. School doesn't have that problem though.
Why? Because us teachers need a break from them kids. That's why!
Why would you get a job as a teacher if you can't handle children?
bouncy house LOL you clearly don't understand what I mean.
Epyrian You're a teacher, enlighten me.
bouncy house Sure.
Having to deal with kids every single day and their parents wears on you mentally and emotionally. By June, you're ready to run for the hills.
We need the 1 1/2 month to 2 month break from them to recharge our batteries and return rejuvenated.
Epyrian Yes, kids and their parents are so horrible you can't complete a full-time job. With that mindset, why would you take that job?
I was in a year around program in junior high. It was a small amount of students out of the rest of the students who attended regularly. I actually liked it. We went for 9 weeks and off for 2 or 3 weeks during the school year. This was in Texas during 1994-1996. I would prefer that than the regular school year. I understand how it could be difficult with a parents work schedule.
It's *_Taiwan_*_, not "Chinese Taipei"_. Taiwan is a sovereign country.
Not according to china
Who cares about China, they're only claiming the territory as their own but it's actually its own country with its own government, currency and military. It's not recognised by foreign governments because they don't want to make the big baby cry, which always likes to be done their way and if otherwise it's "hurting the feelings of the Chinese people," or, as a lot of people like to call it, break the Chinese people's "glass hearts" (打破中国人的玻璃心). I'm aware of this fact because I'm studying Chinese language in a Chinese university, and accessing UA-cam through a VPN.
Lukas Marozas good for you, you want a fucking brownie?
Wolfie That was uncalled for. Not answering to any of your future replies.
Without getting political, that name is at least a poor description. I'm sure the data represents the whole island of Taiwan and not just the city of Taipei.
BTW, if we ran the world according to what China says, we shouldn't even be here on UA-cam.
I'm all for year-round schooling, but not so that more hours can be put in - that just strikes me as absolute madness. I'd rather get two weeks off for spring break and a three at Christmas, and so o, than three months all at once in the summer. Same amount of vacation, just spread across the year.
This is the first time I saw my country(SK) in a video like this. I did not know you knew about us. XD
americans are probably what country is that? is it slovenia?
Try asking them where croatia is XD They are like croa-what!?
What's SK?Salamonkoka?
Slovakia genius.
Not sure if you are troll, or just dumb.
+Lukáš Josai Oh,I thought SK here stood for "South Korea",Because that's the one I usually find,and South Korea is overmentioned in my opinion.
3:00 I agree that kids should go to school all year, but both students AND teachers need breaks from each other. When I was in 3rd and 4th grade they tried a "45/15" program where we had classes for 45 days, 5 days a week then got a break of 15 days.
I loved it. Summer wasn't so long it got boring, and you weren't out of school long enough to lose much of what you had learned.
90% of the crap they try to teach us we will never use in the real world, we need to be taught how to balance a checkbook and how to be financially successful instead of knowing how to use a fucking calculator...
hasty88 _ you use math in finance you fucking moron.
U.S has other issues when it comes to education. What I'm referring to is the atrocious Common Core standards that some states are implementing. I grew up and attended school in Pennsylvania a Common Core state and sophomore year I ended up moving to Virginia a non-Common Core state. In the state of Virginia I was a year and a half behind the rest of the students in my grade due to being in a Common Core environment before. Needless to say I barely graduated high school because things in Virginia are at a much higher level than in Pennsylvania. So what would help the U.S more? Simple ABOLISH THE COMMON CORE STANDARD!
Buidalot i hate common core sooo much, it's so freaking stupid and useless. I want to learn how to pay taxes, not how to find x
One of my biggest regrets is how I completely slept and ignored my studies one year when I had a great teacher who really tried. Even though I had spent the entire half of the year doing nothing she would always call my parents personally to tell them that I wasn't paying attention. I remember deleting a lot of those voice mails.
Students from poverty areas going to government schools should be getting the same results as non-poverty areas PROVIDED the education is delivered to the same quality and course material.
Ernest Bywater Schools are funded from local property taxes I'm pretty sure, so poorer areas have less money to fund their schools and as a result the schools are worse. Vise versa with wealthy areas
Your comment might have some relevance IF all the schools within a district were being funded to the exact same per student rate from each source of funds. In which case they should be getting the same test results as feedback. But that doesn't appear to be the case on either funding or results.
also danger poor area have more gangs and people who have options tend to find that bigger negative, and kids from those areas are more likely to have mental/ family problems, etc
the one thing that i would love to know is that (especially in the UK) why the year starts in September and not in January. I agree that the year could have started in September for the states, but what about the UK, for example, so if it was a similar thing of dating back to when most of the children were needed on the family farm.
Chinese Taipei? Someone is catering to the one China policy. There is only one name that matters and that's the one on the passport; Taiwan, Republic of China!
John White China, UK, USA, France and Russia need to identify it as a country, since china doesn't, Chinese Taipei isn't Taiwan.
I'm a Junior and 17 years old in southern California, personally, i think that the system should work the same way as in East Asia, mainly speaking for Korea and Japan. where students go to school like this,
1st) School days go from Monday-Saturday (Mon-Fri from 8 or 9am to 4 or 5pm, with Saturday being some-what a half day from 8/9am to 2pm)
2nd) School should instead of having 2 months off for summer, make it where you have 1 month off for summer best being August for it being so hot, and 1 month off during the winter, best being January for it being so cold (this would prevent more sickness from both types of whether), but would still give vacation time off for specific holiday's for example thanksgiving, Easter, and presidents week.
3rd) School should make more time for doing homework in class (relating for reasons of #1) and if they need to, they could possibly make an acception for any necessary block schedules that would follow suit with the Monday-Saturday schedule.
Not really fair to compare spending per student considering how much of the "education budget" ends up in the profit margins of Charter schools.
Most year-round school initiatives in the US do not focus on increasing the number of hours spent in classrooms. Most aim to reformat the hours to reduce time off in the summer (and allow longer breaks in the middle of the year).
Most US schools, for example, have a 10-12 week summer break, 1-to1.5 week winter break, and about 1-1.5 weeks split between fall and summer breaks. Year-round propositions frequently reflect the British and Australian school year, which have 6-8 week summer breaks, and longer seasonal breaks or half-term breaks (1-2 weeks in fall, 2-3 weeks in winter, and 1-2 in spring).
The problem with American education is QUALITY, not quantity. The U.S. education system is very poor in modern times, and getting worse rather than better.
Very informative as well as interesting. Thank you Today I Found Out!
900 hrs? I spend on average 1500 hrs per year in dota lul
Томас Андерсон that's like a quarter of your life... Damn bro chill out lmao
Having the summer off of school never made sense to me. Especially when it comes to sickness, far more kids were sick in the winter. Not to mention bad weather like rain and snow obviously being more common in the winter, closing schools for certain days and sometimes weeks. And as a student, I would have loved a year round school. You got breaks far more frequently, even if each break was shorter. Instead of spending 9 months praying for summer to come.
This leads to the real problem with American schools. Its not the amount of days we go to school. Its a host of compounding problems which affect our time in school itself. Most of my teachers were underpaid and had no time to learn new things. Usually working double shifts just to make ends meet (it was very common for a PE teacher to also be a History teacher or a Spanish teacher to also be an art teacher, etc). They didn't have time to learn new material in their primary subject. All their time was spent just working two jobs. But the longer a teacher worked, the higher their salary rose. When their pay rose high enough, the teacher would be able to go back to teaching just one subject. But by that time, they were usually 20+ years past college and drastically behind in even that one subject. And many just gave up. Especially the teachers who gained tenure. Why even bother to teach a class at that point? They could just stand up and babble on about Julius Caesar and hobbits, despite the fact that its a math class. Leaving the student to have to go try and figure out how matrices work from an outdated textbook. And its ridiculously hard to learn how to do math with no visual examples.
Because of this and a laundry list of other problems, many people are looking for the federal government to take over all schools. This sounds good on paper. But in practice, I can see many of the same problems reoccurring. And on a massive scale. Schools are already having enough trouble being regulated by a small committee in the downtown of said local city. Imagine of all schools across the nation are now being controlled by a federal department in Washington DC. For the record, schools in Washington DC get their funding directly from Congress. And it has produced some of the most dangerous and lowest testing schools in the nation.
I think a more practical solution would be to pay teachers a higher wage, but based on test scores. Not the students test scores, but giving tests to the teachers themselves. Hold the teacher to the same standard as the student. And it has the added benefit of measuring if the teacher actually knows their subject. As well as if they are coherent enough to remain a teacher.
American education is horrible in every facet.
the spring and fall break used to be two weeks long. this was done away with many years ago in my area of the US. that break was in fact when most planting and the harvests where brought in. I don't know if they have more than a day or two off in spring and fall anymore.
Simon, please don't make us spend extra hours on school!!!
What a strange approach to year round schooling, the ones we have here in Alberta, Canada, have their vacation time spread out over the year and no extra class hours. And they can still participate in most major sports with ease. They still get a month off in the summer, a month around Christmas and a month around Easter.
*sighs* Don't fix what's not broken. ._.
But our education system *_is_* broken.
No, full year school won't help. Here in my country implements a full-year school, and we only have 2-3 weeks of break per semester. Here, the state high schools start their lesson at 7 AM and finish by 4 PM, so with a 5 days a week, and around 10 effective months (12-holidays), we spend over a whopping 1900 hours of school a year.
And what I can tell you, is that these many school hours make you exhausted both physically and psychologically, and that students would still have to attend extra lessons outside schools just to make their grade pass. These many hours though, doesn't translate well into performance in college, as not a lot of my country's graduates don't really perform well internationally.
Furthermore, the amount of time that is spent in school activity reduces the available amount of time to socialize with neighbors (tropical country so daylight's over at 6), to interact with family, and to do even extracurricular school activities.
What needs to be done instead IMO is to optimize the curriculum, make it so that students can learn AND understand the most with the least amount of time required.
Hi I'm 60 and when I was a boy in Northern England one week a year we would go down to the local farm's and help harvest the potato crop for local farmers. I don't know if this was officially sanctioned or just a arrangement with the principal, nevertheless it happened.
As a teacher, I'd definitely advocate for year-round school. 3 day weekends with 2 week breaks at the beginning and end of summer. This would reduce week-to-week stress as well as allow time for exams to be conducted outside instructional time at the cost of only a few extra weeks in school; this could also allow schools to invest in more extracurricular projects. Year-round school doesn't necessarily mean a year in the classroom; students and teachers could spend a couple weeks a year doing service projects around town, competing in Olympics-like games w/ other schools, or going on day trips. Most of my students have lived in this city their whole lives and no little to nothing about it.
Oh, pish tosh, man!!
They get summer off to celebrate my natal anniversary, June 27th.
I'm both proud and humbled.
As a future teacher and someone who comes from a family teachers, I think people have a misunderstanding of "year round school." Instead of a 3 month summer month, many schools have a 1-2 month summers and longer vacation weeks (ex: my sister has a week off in October and a week off for Thanksgiving, and then 2-3 weeks off for Christmas in exchange for a shorter summer). This system benefits low-income schools for many reasons.
1) those families probably cannot afford vacations in the first place, so half of the argument becomes irrelevant
2) those parents cannot afford to take time off for summer, so children are left at home all day anyway
3) children who are left at home may not get entertainment, AC, adequate meals, etc... all of which many schools provide for children
4) many elementary schools have summer school programs anyway through the YMCA or Boys and Girls Club (kind of like an all day after school program), so the government might as well help with funding it
Now what about separating the 3 months of vacation over the year? You'd have 3 months on and 1 month off. This way, the break isn't as long so you won't forget everything over the long break. I think schools in warmer climates have done this because it's still pretty much summer even in something like April.
Need more info! What was the increase in hours per year spent in class on average with year round school? What if we had year round school but kept the average hours per year spent in class the same as now. We could have a whole month off in December like colleges. A month off in summer and two weeks off for spring break and perhaps a fall break as well. Then either have 4 day weeks or shorter days to get the average hours spent in class per year down to 900 as we have now. That way students don't lose all that knowledge from being out of class for 3 months. I can tell you how many class at the start of a semester or even topics have to review old material before starting the new stuff cause students forgot. Also if there were shorter days but still 5 days a week class students would have more outside the classroom time to study if they need it, after school activities (sports/clubs) or even a job if they want money and can handle the work load along with their education. As well as plenty of time each day for relaxation and fun.
Hell, at the Academy I went to, I attended classes three days of any given week, and often would have an equivalent of three months off.
Homeschooling was very well supported, and often worked for the better.
It's not the hours teaching that counts it's the quality of teaching that counts . A teacher that can enthuse and interests the students , that's what really counts . That is the real skill in teaching !
In Ontario, elementary and high school students get 2 months off ( July and August). University and College students get 4 months off (May, June, July and August).
Students will learn as much as the effort they put into learning, period.
My state Michigan is pretty low on the rankings for best education for a state. Detroit has an awful schooling system that destroyed our ranking. I go to a charter school called Achieve Charter Academy that is a k-8 school. We are ranked first in state for both middle and elementary schools. We average to be about a year and a half a head of our local public schools ( who also happen to be one of the best districts in state). The advanced math class is an additional 1.5 years ahead of that. Not to mention that my 6th grade Curriculum is more advanced than the junior year at a neighboring district. Relevance? We are an NHA school so they take 10% of funds to our school to build new schools. We don’t have the same budget but we still have many sports for both genders and 24 chrome books a grade. At what cost? Teacher’s salary. Our teachers suffer the loss but for a safer and easier work environment, No Retirement.
I actually support year round education but not more hours in school. You can do this by shortening the summer break and extend winter and spring break. This would be a trimester style schedule. The continuing education/ overwork problem can be solved by instituting a forced leave policy every year to year and a half. The issue is not just number of instruction hours but also time for remedial education, diverting poorer students from the bad element during the summer when crime is peaking (not everyone has money to go on vacations during the summer). Not to mention a summer session would be useful to immediately apply standardize testing result to remedial education. So yes this raises valid points against the year long school year but doesn't really look at why the other reasons why the policy has merit. The focus is should not just be what the teachers prefer or what the parents want, but what the students need. The opinions provided are completely one sided here even with the acknowledgement that it is a simplification.
i've hated school ever since i was 6 years old.
Most subjects don't interest me at all and do not prepare me for the future. (math for example,i don't need anything but the basics for what i want to do later.)
When i was 11 and our class laughed when there was something in our books related to sex,the teachers would always say ''stop being so childish'' well what do you expect?11 year olds have to be adults now?
the point of school and college is to prepare you for working 9 to 5 (dolly parton reference hehe)
Life should be spent living,and working morning to evening is not living,unless you really like your job (and most people dont like their job)
I'm scared for the future,as simply going to school and doing my homework is too much for me.. it's already driving me into exhaustion and depression
i hope i can find a job in the future that's part time and pays enough for me to live comfortably.
The school/work system needs some serious changes but they will probaly never be implemented,or atleast not until im dead
In Canada it is actually fun to go to school because our teacher lets us do science experiments and do something called passions where we get to research anything we like, even video games
My english teacher says "because the school cant afford air conditioning its easier to just give them time off" she said thats the new reason as to why we do it, since theres so little agriculture now. Highschool in chicago so its a urban area
Yeah, I dislike the idea of Year-round school. As a 15-year-old, having to deal with AP/Pre-AP classes would be extremely stressful, not to mention that it would be awkward to transition from grade to grade with only a week or so in between. It would also be difficult for some extracurricular activities, (namely band and color guard), that use Summer as a time to help teach and begin working on activities for the year, to do what they need to do while not interfering with regular school hours. I like having the summers to just laze around and recuperate for the upcoming school year; and it's a more refreshing transition from grade to grade. I actually feel like I've closed off a chapter of my life, and that is somehow very healing to me mentally.
Anyway, that's just my input, but I hope that they don't go through with changing to a year-round school year.