I know this is typical for the US so this is more for US people to respond to. I wouldn’t say that it is the best system for work, just wondering about the disconnect.
Because even I don’t want to work 9-5.
(Also, when are teachers supposed to do things like grade work, or kids to have extracurricular activities, 9-5 is draining, add in music or sports and there’s nothing left)
This was my first thought. Teachers definitely need time to assess outside of class time. I would think that assessment or grading would happen while they aren’t teaching. There should be a system where teachers grade outside of teaching time or during “homework/study hall” time. You would teach math for 6 hours and grade math for 2 or some breakdown that makes sense. I don’t want to make teachers work anymore than they already do. The current system doesn’t seem to respect them either way.
Also, why do teacher need to do all the grading?
Who do you propose else does it? Teachers know their students and can learn from tests etc and help them do better. additionally to the original argument, it’s not just grading that teachers have to do as well, also lesson/course planning, setup for lessons (eg slideshow/lab/printing). There’s just a lot for teachers to do outside of the classroom.
Well most universities have TAs that either just do all grading, assist with grading, or help with lesson plans and it seems to work okay.
In an ideal system, there isn’t a reason that grade school teacher couldn’t have a TA that is also present in the class and familiar with the students.
Well you would have to hire someone to do that, and it’s my understanding that teachers are mostly underpaid and understaffed, so to at a minimum double the number of teachers would be excessively costly, to the point where even imagining it is laughable.
Not that I don’t like the idea, it’s just not feasible.
See: “In an ideal system”
This whole discussion is complete fantasy to begin with since changing the fundamental scheduling of the public education system would require a complete overhaul anyway.
Well, you assess knowledge by using simplified electronic quizzes to take the busy work out of it, then dive into the “show your work” for those students who are struggling. And students who have mastered the material can work with those who are struggling and serve as a force multiplier. Tutoring others makes them even better students, and those tutored will have more 1:1 time than they could possibly get with a teacher.
Khan Academy has been working with schools in the Bay Area for more than a decade and the results are pretty astounding. Salman Khan’s TED Talk in 2011 is an exciting glimpse of the possible, and by all accounts those who use Khan Academy software and methods are reaping the benefits.
Can you tell me more about how Khan Academy have worked with schools in the Bay Area? I just finished uni and now have my teaching degree. I work in Sweden but I would like to read more about this.
I just know what Salman Khan has said about it – watch his videos for more.
It isn’t even just grading work. In my high school classroom I have students ranging from a second grade reading level to post grad. Every reading, worksheet, science lab, project needs to have accommodations and modifications written in to encompass that. That takes time.
Or creating a new lesson. Making a new lesson for a 50 minute period takes at least an hour.
Clearly you and I participated in very different school experiences. In highschool, I got on my bus each day at 7:30 and got back off the bus at 16:00. If you subtract the 30 minute lunch period, that adds up to almost exactly 8 hours each day.
Factoring in the 2 hours of homework that was regularly assigned, I actually have substantially more free-time as a working 9-5 adult (my school did not have “study hall” time). A young me would have done unspeakable things for a chance at abolishing homework!
Just because students are at school does not mean they are in a typical class. Our school has athletics right after classes. We got out about 5. Just make other options, perhaps skills, clubs, study hall, etc.
Some of it can be done during study hall, while kids are doing their work.
There are compelling reasons send them 9-5
There are also compelling reasons not to
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Teachers spend a non-trivial amount of time post class working on previous assignments, future assignments, setting up tests coordinating with other teachers and staff. If they start all this at 5, they’re stuck at the office until very late.
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Busses/kids on the road before rush hour
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Extra-curricular activities are better off earlier than later, don’t want clubs running into diner time.
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better chance of getting home before dark in winter at Northern latitudes
Better chance of getting home before dark in winter at Northern latitudes.
Cries in living at 62o north
- We shouldn’t be forcing our children to spend the majority of their waking lives chained to a desk doing menial work mixed with some valuable education and instead allow them to actually be kids and be outside doing kid things.
I’m a private teacher and I see so many kids who are like, I am in school from 8-3:30, then from 3:50-5 I’m in softball, then I’m in a study group from 5:30-7. I go to bed at 9.
Kids aren’t allowed to be kids much of the time anymore. Most everything seems to be in the duality of either “Glued to their devices” or “Endless cycle of extracurricular and studying”
I absolutely refused to do homework back in the day. I had one math teacher that took your median grade and used that as the final grade. I would calculate to the assignment what it took to get an a, and do that much homework between arriving to class and the time she checked homework in.
I would always rush to complete my assignments early in other classes do any homework that I could get done before class change. I always aced my tests.
I think the worst was when the teacher would assign us to read ahead of chapter for the next days lesson. Yeah so you want me to be miserable tonight, and double bored tomorrow.
I also hated that the teachers never communicated. They would unintentionally group-assign hours of workload in non-GT classes.
For #4, with current school hours, you either go to school in darkness or you go home in darkness. That’s just reality for those who live further north.
This is true, I would argue that it’s relatively better have the darkness be early in the morning less mischief happens.
In the winter, even at the most southern point (Windsor, ON) Canada gets dark around 4pm.
What if all the honework in the future is done online and multiple choice… if its a written asignment it can be graded by an AI. Bada bing teachers have not much more to complain about. If you are a teacher and are still complaining about having to grade homework, its probably because your administration is stuck in 2007.
A better argument would be, is homework worth it? Once AI has significantly advanced to be trustworthy enough to grade, it will be trustworthy enough to do the homework.
Want to be forward facing? How long before AI replaces teachers? What if classes were solely presented as video feeds. At any point you can raise your hand, It would stop the video feed. You ask the AI question. It formulates a response and then tests you to make sure that you understand the answer before moving on.
Imagine getting the equivalent of one-on-one tutoring in every subject.
What if instead of milestone tests the AI just follows along and makes sure you understand what’s going on? What if the next day it does a quick recap on the previous days lesson and asks you a couple of questions to make sure you get it?
What happens when each individual learns at their own pace and goes as fast or as slow as they need to. What happens when you can just walk away from a lesson and come back later?
Edit: I just cleaned up some text from voice dictation.
There are a couple of flaws with this. I spend a great deal of time structuring lessons to get students working with each other. I have met, and taught, too many people who have said that the only reason they stuck out through high school was the relationships they developed with thier peers and staff. We’ve seen what happens when students only do solo computer work, and it isn’t pretty.
There’s no requirement to be socially ostracized. You can still have groups, clubs, online and offline connections.
I suspect most students will likely find they have more spare/social time. When they can learn at their own pace with individual attention.
You may find that less kids feel like they are toughing it out, under these scenarios.
I use the Modern Classroom Model for my classroom for the last couple of years which is a self-paced system. In 2020 during our zoom school year I was also fully self paced. Here are a few things I’ve found.
A handful of students will shut down with self-paced learning. They have low self-efficacy and are failure avoidant.
Another handful of students will hand off their chromebook to “the smart kid” in a different class and have them take the mastery checks for them. They will end up bombing the mastery assessment, but teenagers are not known for their executive function.
A different handful have limited capacity for additional cognitive load. It is hard to do school when you don’t know where you are sleeping that night or some other chronic trauma. They thrive when being told explicitly what to do, how to do it.
Yet another handful will fly through the curriculum because they long ago figured out the game of school. Yet when I check in and ask deep, meaningful questions to see if they really understand the topic, they can’t.Young gen Z and gen alpha really need to work on social skills and work ethic. Solo-self-paced experiences don’t cover it.
I disagree on the work ethic point, but that could be its own whole rant about how the concept of “work ethic” is fundamentally flawed in a society where many jobs simply aren’t fulfilling and are only done for the carrot on a stick of being able to buy food and a roof over your head.
But on everything else, I wholeheartedly agree as somebody who came to hate the school system but loves to learn. It’s not just a Gen Z and younger issue, though I imagine they have it even worse considering the pandemic. I think it’s a flaw in how the school system is designed. School focuses on solo work almost to the exclusion of collaboration, and life just doesn’t work that way. Society is a collaborative effort, and even working at a cubicle farm on a solo project, it’s not like you can’t talk to your fellow workers to help solve problems. Plus, the pass or fail mechanism of the grading system ends up punishing mistakes and either creates risk aversion outright, kids who don’t bother because they’ve failed so many times that they believe it’s not worth even trying, or those kids who do well without trying until they get to later grades and have no study habits, who then learn that if they’re not instantly good at something, then it’s not worth putting effort into because they don’t know how to be bad at something long enough to get good.
I’m certainly no teacher, but I think the issue is that the foundational framework of our current school system was designed to create workers who could be expected to work on a factory line. People who could be given a short and simple list of repetitive tasks to follow, without the need for collaboration or anything more mentally demanding. Add in that many school subjects (at least when I was in school 15-20 years ago) lack any real-world context to their purpose, just “learn this because you have to,” and I’m not surprised that kids also have no drive to dig deeper than a surface level understanding. I remember the mentality of “just remember it long enough to do the test, and then dump it for the next set of things you have to learn.” It got me through high school.
AI doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, let alone what somebody else doesn’t know.
“Understanding” is just something that AI can’t do. It doesn’t know what your words mean, or what it’s own word mean.
The advantage of curriculum is that you could feed it a textbook or a dozen and have that be the only information it knows. It doesn’t need to know everything, just the specific criteria that a government sets as baseline knowledge for specific tiers.
The science will improve with time.
AI isn’t good enough to grade written responses. If your referring to chat gtp and the like, they meant to be factual. Also online multiple choice homework can suck awfully depending on the course; physics comes to mind in this scenario since it requires an answer with precision and matching units to mark the homework as correct and that can make it really difficult to resolve and even if the teacher sets it up for partial credit if you get it right after attempts, if you can’t figure it out it is a 0. That physics homeaork destroyed and consumed my entire life lol
God I hope not I can’t stand ai grading an answer can be partially right or even wrong but cause interesting discussion from a human while badly implemented AI (which is what schools likily would have access to) will just give a percentage failure rate and move on.
AI is nowhere near good enough to be trusted with grading written assignments, and won’t be for a very long time.
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Schools don’t exist solely to prepare you for soul crushing work. It is supposed to actually educate you.
Unfortunately, nowadays, the schools fail at both
America moment
Working 9-to-5 is miserable. It only helps if the wolk you’re doing is interesting.
For a child, school is usually not ‘interesting’. Children shouldn’t be subjected to misery.
P.s. Props to you for saying you’re in the US, not just assuming it.
Because kids are too young to drink.
And the teachers aren’t supposed to.
I don’t think school should emulate work.
Learning (well) isn’t easy, attention spans are limited and after some time you get rapidly diminishing results.
I personally like the sound of inverting the structure we use for learning, meaning assigning the “theory” as homework and using class time to discuss or apply it afterwards.
At least that has the benefit of letting every student manage their time, spending more time on harder (for them) subjects.
attention spans are limited and after some time you get rapidly diminishing results
Same is true in work, and why work weeks should be limited to 40 hours max. Americans work too much, and this is based on what Harvard says after studying it.
I personally like the sound of inverting the structure we use for learning, meaning assigning the “theory” as homework and using class time to discuss or apply it afterwards.
I like the idea, too. It has not been shown to have a meaningful positive effect up to now, as far as I know.
So what do you do when the kids don’t learn the theory for homework and so can’t do any of the work in class?
That’s where the discussion comes in. With an instructor to moderate and a class working together who will overall have grasped it. Those who didn’t pick it up reading learn by doing.
But personally, I don’t like the idea of kids doing schoolwork outside school hours. I went to a trade-school college and we would do trimesters with 9 weeks for a single class. Spent the whole day just in that class, six hours. First half learning theory then putting it into practice in the second half. By nine weeks, you’d know that subject pretty well. But that was complicated stuff, and honestly, probably didn’t even require 9 weeks. But it’s a good starting model. Fully immerse kids in a subject for weeks where they don’t have to mix in other subjects to muddy their forming brains. Homework won’t be needed and they’ll have a much better grasp on the subject at the end. You could do 6 classes for 6 weeks each a school year.
And I feel like early education kind of already does this. They typically will focus on a subject for weeks instead of trying to fit in 5 a day. It’s just the upper levels we’ve decided to shuffle kids around multiple times a day.
I like your enthusiasm and your heart is in the right place but it doesn’t translate on a practical level. I’m a teacher and an independant school in my town tried this, unfortunately didn’t work.
To simulate modern work it should either be 8-6 with 30 minutes for lunch or a 0 hour contract where a different school calls you every day so you know which one to go to the next day, sometimes it’s 4am-12midday and sometimes 6pm-4am.
Also you would have to turn up and then sit around twiddling your thumbs for 45 minutes before being given a 15-minute task and then going on lunch.
The homework aspect in theory helps with the University structure.
Cynicism: also primes for the need to bring work home and be available off the clock.
Yes, but also: In a lot of professions you have a lot of freedom regarding when you work. I’m browsing lemmy now, and getting to work at around 10, but I worked late on Friday, and I’m probably going to be answering some mails after dinner today.
I think this is just going to become more common: Not paying people for for the time they are at work, but rather for the job they do. That means that if you prefer to work 9-5, thats fine, but if you prefer to leave earlier or start later, and get some of your work done in the afternoon/weekends, thats also fine, as long as you get the job done.
I very much enjoy having that freedom. Even though it means I may be expected to pull longer days every now and then, it also means nobody questions me for leaving early when the weather is nice.
This exactly demonstrates my mindset.
As someone who is getting ready to work at 9pm on a Sunday night…what’s this clock you speak of?
Perhaps. But only the last 2-4 years. No student below high school should have homework (there is research to back this up). And they can do it in study hall, not necessarily at home. College courses have like half the class time, so professors hit the hard parts and expect students to read and get the rest on their own.
No student below high school should have homework (there is research to back this up).
Might I ask what research? Could you give me a source or two? I’m rather intrigued by this
I found a summary, but the link to the research is broken:
A lot of schools are going to this model now, at least in Texas around me. Texas requires interventions if kids fail the STAAR (the statewide test they take that shows they know the material they’ve learned during the school year) so a lot of schools have built in an intervention period (or whatever the campus calls it) to give those kids the intervention time. My kid doesn’t need intervention so they just do their homework during that time. They can sign up to go to certain teachers to get help, too. And a lot of schools/teachers have gotten away from assigning homework, since it just punishes the kids who don’t have support st home.
I guess that’s another suspect of eating away people’s time. If university takes more than 8 hours then it is also in question. If people want to be subjected to work outside of their 8 hour window, they should be allowed. Forcing this is crazy.
The thing about university “requiring” people to work more than 8 hours is this: It’s not a human right to become a system architect, physicist or engineer. Universities typically don’t require more than 8 hours per day, but a lot of studies in practice require more than 8 hours if you want to be able to get through them. Relaxing the requirements for passing a degree would mean less competent professionals leaving the universities, and I don’t think anyone getting on a plane or going into surgery wants that.
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True. Sadly, many don’t get that time after they’ve done hours of homework and mandatory extracurriculars every day and twice on Saturday.
Edit: typo
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I tend to ignore people dunking on Americans because, let’s face it, a lot of the criticism is warranted. But this seems completely out of left field. I’ve never heard this stereotype before.
We don’t infantilize people in their early 20’s. American’s don’t view 23 year olds as “naive kids.” We tend to view 18 and year olds that way but by the time you hit 22 you are definitely an adult. A lot of us move away from home for college, spend a year or two in the dorms and then get a private apartment. Finances permitting, people tend to choose not moving back in with their parents after graduation. Also keep in mind that a significant chunk of Americans don’t go to college and enter the workforce/military/whatever at 18.
What kind of dorms are you talking about? That sounds more like a boarding school than a college dorm. The only rules involved fire hazards (no candles) and no illegal substances. I don’t know anyone who has had a dorm experience even remotely like that. Maybe at extremely religious private colleges? But those would be an exception to the rule.
I know the drinking age being 21 is seen as dumb by most of the world, and a lot of Americans feel that way too. Most Americans drink before 21 anyway.
I think their comment is the first time I’ve seen someone seriously suggest that “actual” adults are 15-16. It actually really creeps me the fuck out.
It’s not as uncommon as you think it is. There are a whole contingent of mofos who want the voting age lowered to 16, mostly millennials who realized the system was bullshit at a young age. I’m kind of on the fence about it.
I’m sure some creeps would co-opt it for their own evil purposes, though, though I don’t think that’s a reason not to do it.
I don’t agree necessarily with arbitrary maturity lines like drinking at 18/21, but suggesting people might be thought of as adults at 14 is madness. Most kids aren’t finished going through puberty at that age and it’s different for everyone (by like 5-6 years potentially). I think 18 is the “arbitrary” age for most things because 99% of kids have finished puberty at that age and we aren’t in a rush to get those 14-18 year old working in factories.
The whole “capitalism delayed adulthood to 18” arguement doesn’t make sense to me considering very capitalist mills and sweatshops have historically used child labour throughout history.
Also, very important point most people ignore, the human brain doesn’t finish developing until around 25.
I agree with you, but isn’t the whole “the brain doesn’t finish developing until around 25” claim bogus?
Yes, your brain develops and changes throughout your life. It’s just anti-child bigotry bullshit from millennials who of all people should know better.
Ngl, I don’t think I’ve ever heard it from a millennial. But yeah, its kinda silly given if your brain stopped developing you would lose your memory…
or at least, ability to gain memories. I’m not a neuroscientist.
Military-like discipline? In public schools? You couldn’t be more wrong.
So…you’re against this proposal?
A lot of the school system is set on many of the people in the country being farmers so you do a lot of scheduling to allow them to work on the farm. This is why do you get the summers off and some other vacations that fit with other major times for growing crops?
I’m pretty familiar with the farming aspect of all of this, but clearly we are way beyond needing children for farming (except for some child labor law changes that I’d like to ignore in this case). To me, it sounds like a legacy issue that was never changed with the times. Just my observation
And there’s no reason urban and rural schools need to run on exactly the same schedule. Urban districts have been experimenting with things like year-round school for decades.
Instead of adopting the archaic 9-5, how about just eliminate homework?
How about we eliminate homework and switch to a 32 hour (or whatever) work week…
A lot of rural districts are going down to 4 day school days (although some are 10 hour days) in an attempt to attract teachers.
Not sure how well that is going for families, given that it’s difficult to have one parent at home when the kids are home an extra day.
As a teacher I 100% support this, it would be much better for teachers and students. It won’t happen though unless parents are also given a 4 day work week so they can look after their kids.
Ontario, Canada has all but eliminated homework entirely until high school. There is absolutely no good data saying it helps in acquisition or retention of skills over the long term. Completion of homework is also strongly correlated along class lines. If Suzy has a stable home, is fed well, and gets good sleep, she will likely have time and resources to complete homework. If Todd doesn’t, he likely won’t. We should focus on the in-school instruction. As far as the length of day? If you keep the kids longer it will cost more so it’s unlikely many jurisdictions will raise taxes for that expenditure.
It’s interesting how different the quality of schooltime can be, and how perception of said time can differ for school kids as well. I was in a “full day” school starting from age 9 in a country where regular schools end at lunch time. Our school had the same curriculum to go through as every other, but lots more time to do it. The extra time was filled with dedicated self-learn time ( basically to do homework, but you have your classmates around to talk and help each other and can reach out to teachers if you really struggle with something) and elective extracurricular activities. It was mandatory, but you had free choice between all the offers. Teachers had to offer something, and usually offered their personal passion activities/hobbies. This led to these activities being the highlight of every kid’s week, because there was enough variety to choose from to find something you liked. Kinda like club activities in US schools, but much less codified and without competitive objectives. Some examples are photography, pottery, soap box car building, school beautification ( we literally were allowed and encouraged to graffiti/mural the school walls :D ), gardening, natural science ( basically constantly doing fun physics and chemistry experiments without boring theory), electronics etc. . This was intentionally kept separate from sports or music, which also were partially elective: you had to do sports and music, and some basics were mandatory for all, but you could opt for specializations. All this semi-forced mingling served well to prevent the formation of strong clique boundaries, without inhibiting kids from pursuing their talents and passions.
All that had huge advantages. Kids from troubled families had a much easier time of keeping up with everyone else, as help from home was hardly necessary. Lunch was provided by the school. Wasn’t stellar, wasn’t horrible. But it was available to all students for free, and that can be very important to some as well. It took me a long time, often only after visiting school friends for the first time or even after schooltime was over entirely, to realize how crazy rich or poor some of my friends’ families actually were, or what difficulties they sometimes faced at home and that there was a reason we never were invited to visit them. At school, it simply didn’t matter to us. Sure, some wore more brand clothes than others, but nobody thought of using this as a measure of personal quality. Class cohesion also was usually strong. Sure, kids still were assholes and bullies like everywhere else, but it usually got solved internally quickly, because it was harder to keep it up for full days with plenty of “forced” social time, and you ended up being more confronted with the damage and hurt you caused. And in really bad cases the proximity to school made it much easier for teachers to pick up on any developments in their students and classes and react quickly. There also were some mandatory “social skill” classes to teach everyone basic conflict solving and mediating. It was only one or two sessions per year, but I think it actually helped, even if we kids usually scoffed at it at the time. It was very clear the school philosophy was not to push through a curriculum, but to use the extra time to help explore and form personalities that later will hopefully enmesh well in society. And yes, our school had a bit more teaching personnel than other schools to fill all the time slots and extra activities, but we still had 25-35 students per class, it was not some utopian dream.
We kids loved the full day spent at school as well. No homework, and what’s better than spending the entire day with your friends? The school was far from my home, so I left the house at 6:30 and usually got back around 18:00, with about 40min of train commute plus 30min of walking (one way). Only Friday ended at lunch. Still never felt that I was lacking “me” time.
Tl;Dr : It matters a lot how the time at school is used.
When would the teachers have time to lesson plan or grade if they’re teaching kids 8 hours a day?
Just because students are at school from 9 to 5 doesn’t mean every single teacher has to be in front of a class from 9 to 5.
While the kids are doing whatever they used to call homework in class. Split classes between teachers: one supervises while one works.
You don’t manage a lot of kids, do you?
It’s literally what they do in my wife’s class where they have 24 each but hey what would I know
“My wife’s a primary school teacher so I know enough to solve education issues”
Here is a functional solution you want to ignore because you look down on primary school teachers
No its because I am a teacher and you have no idea what you’re talking about
18 hours to think that up? Yeah, you’re not a teacher.
So are you asking for twice as many teachers or twice as many kids per teacher?
The struggle to hire teachers is already high and the GOP is trying to put as many obstacles as possible to slowly strangle public schools and shift to charter/private schools.
I’m from Morocco, and school usually goes from 8 to 12, then again from 2 to 6, sometimes 3 to 7. Yes, we can leave school as late as 7 in the evening sometimes. During the winter, that’s exactly when the sun sets. Also, you have lunch at home. Every. Single. Time. Also, only Wednesdays are exempt from afternoon school, but only if you’re in primary school, because as soon as you enter secondary school, the whole week is filled up to the brim. And add homework on top of all this. And usually we get that from every single subject (yes, even PE). In many ways, this is worse than what you Muricans are doing. If you guys are being tortured, we’re being sent to hell and back 5 days a week every single week for the most part. Also, 1 week holidays every 6 weeks. That’s it. And since we’re Muslims, we don’t even get the 2-3 week “Christmas break”. You stay home on January 1st, and go to school the very next day if it’s not a weekend. We even study during Ramadan. It sucks less because we leave earlier, but it still sucks. Also, we don’t have snow days. Only a super small part of the country gets snow, and you still have to go to school even if that happens. And during the final years of high school, you have a final exam that contains EVERY SINGLE LESSON IN THE YEAR. All of them. Both semesters. And you bet that I hated this when I had to go through it.
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