I did a school show the other day at 2 pm. There were about two hundred kids sitting in the school auditorium No one died, but it was a dead crowd. Teachers and kids came up afterward and told me that they liked it, but you woudn’t have known it during the show. Most of them sat there, semi-comatose. Great periods of silence. Quite the contrast to the show I had done in the morning. That morning, it seemed I could do no wrong. What was wrong with my show in the afternoon?
I don’t think it was me.
If you’ve been performing for a while, you know a dead room almost immediately – three minutes into the performance, you’re pulling out all your tricks, every thing you’ve learned to get some kind of reaction, but they sit there, deep in their seats, and they ain’t moving for you. It’s just something to get through, and you accept it. It’s not always about me – it’s just where they are.
That show was a dead room. And the truth is, most school shows in the afternoon are much more difficult than the ones in the morning. The teachers don’t react. It’s harder to get the kids to participate. Their attention wanders. Everyone is tired. You can see it in their eyes and in the way they sit.
Generally, I try to avoid doing afternoon shows.
All this has me thinking about the move towards having longer school days. I would like to know whose bright idea this is. Who thinks that kids can learn more than a certain amount in any given day? Who thinks that extending the day will raise the almighty test scores?
Ask any teacher when they teach math and reading. Not at 2:30 in the afternoon, that’s for sure. It’s too late, at that point. As my memory serves me, that was when the health teacher taught us how to brush our teeth – a lesson I was taught every year, and a lesson I still haven’t learned, according to Peggy, my dental hygienist.
More instruction is not the answer to greater learning. It’s a simple answer, and easily instituted (ah, then, perhaps the politicians…), but not an intelligent one. The proof to this is the kids I meet who are taught well at home in a home schooling situation (and not all home schooling situations fit this description). Academics can be handled in a couple of hours, when the kids is alert and attentive. Another class at 2:45 is not going to solve the problems faced by the American educational system.
This observation is so transparent it boggles my mind that there’s any discussion about it. Who does anything well at 2 pm in the afternoon? A good time for a kickball game, I think. Or for doing something with your hands.
There are two arguments for a longer school day – one sad, and one logical, but not really about education. The first is that instituting a longer school day frees adults from having to deal with children for another hour or so. This is the argument for school as warehouses or holding bins – not a particularly positive aspect of education. The other, with more merit, is that for many kids, especially in urban areas, the late afternoon hours are fraught with danger – it’s when kids are most at risk for bad things happening. But this is not really an argument for more instruction, but instead an argument for a safe place for them to be.
Other than that, I don’t know why anyone thinks more hours of school is a good idea.
I sure don’t.
Wow. I was ready to advocate homeschooling, but you did that for me. I love the flexibility … kids, everyone really, learn when the time is right … and that is different for each person. My “time” is early morning. My kids have their own times; these differ from mine. We can accomplish so much in a short time, if we time it right.
Love your insight & your blog…. G.
I believe I disagree with you on this one Bill, but for a different reason. It’s not the length of day that does the kids in, it is the intensity of the amount of information that they have to cram into kids heads with new standards and expectations of competition with other nations. The length of day based on how we are teaching children sets up this dilemma of morning is the best time to teach or perform and the afternoon is dead time, where kids are learning how to survive in a frenetic world.
My concept of a longer day, would be not to teach these kids any more than they are learning now, but to run it more like home schooling, where more of the fun stuff that home schooled kids get to do, happen in school. Maybe more nap times and/or field trips. Maybe more projects that connect to the kids, than to the standards. Allowing kids to learn and take breathers. You still might get the dead performances close to the end of the school day, but think about how much more enjoyable and fascinating schooling will be. Learning would be a good thing that wouldn’t have to stop when school ended. Everything would just flow together.
Of course the reality is that this is never going to happen. Based on that premise I will agree with you. Longer school days keeping our education system the same will not produce better learners. It just disengages kids from wanting to learn. And makes dead audiences in the afternoon.
I’m in Harvey’s corner. It is not the length of the day that is the problem, it is the quality and type of instruction. If our model for learning is how much can we cram into kid’s heads, then time is an issue. By 2:00 in the afternoon most kids are bored into a stupor. Not even Bill Harley can stir them out of it! Teachers are just as bored. How exciting is a worksheet or a test prep page. How exciting is it to watch a group of kids work on a worksheet or a test prep page. Learning should be fun. It should be collaborative! It should be exciting. It should be participatory and undertaken with things and people you love to work with. Boring kids longer per day is certainly not the answer to our schools’ problem.
Okay, I’m on board. Institute parasailing, taiko drumming and breadbaking and I’m for longer days. Or something like that. But I suspect the longer days to be instituted would be more of the same.
Thanks Bill for providing a simple observation that anyone who is actually investigating the problems of education would pick up, if the agenda were really about educating our kids.
I’m frustrated by so many attempts to ‘fix’ education when I’m not convinced that it’s actually that broken. And many of the complaints, and fixes for the complaints are seated in an agenda that has more footing in politics and greed than our children.
I am convinced that the oversight and administration of education is broken.
And I’m pretty sure from direct observation that not enough parents are engaged with their kids, much less their education.
I see pitifully few studies that are actually observing the process of education, and the co-requisites to success in education.
As a husband to a long time teacher I’ve seen a string of ‘easy fixes’ that do little more than create more disruption in the process.
I don’t know the answer, but I bet that by applying the good old ‘scientific’ method, or as business calls it – business process improvement we could come up with some local solutions that work pretty well.
And look afield to where success is happening, deconstruct it to understand it, and see if we can replicate that locally.
As a 40 year survivor of the classroom wars, I empathize with what you have said, Bill. The afternoon is a time for naps and fingerpainting, not math and grammar. However, I did have some success in my afternoon classes by telling stories to illustrate the things that I was trying to teach.
Enlisting the students in telling about their experiences that were similar to those from a story we had read also gathered a spark of life as well.
Overall, let’s quit allowing bureucrats and politicians, who know nothing of education or kids, dictate the way learning should be done in this country. Dream on for a uptopia, he said….
This post really gave me food for thought. Here in Hawaii we are now going through the state pulling money back to what seems the detriment of everyone.
Our children are now going through furloughs 2 days a month. We have the shortest school hours in the nation.
It has been upsetting for me as my grandson who is in kindergarden is being short changed, I feel.
But now that you mention what happens in the afternoon I have to think. My grandson, though having shorter hours is still learning adding and subtraction and he is now capable of reading many words. This is due to his teacher using the time that he has wisely. He’s great!
When I was in kindergarden in the 50′s with longer hours I only learned my ABC’s and how to write my numbers. So that makes me think is it really the length of day?
I home schooled my granddaughter in her 8th year and we only worked 3 hours a day. When she went back in her 9th year she was far ahead of her class from 9th grade to 11th. Hmm. Something to think about.
Hmm Bill, Perhaps that school had authoritative teachers who’d told the children to sit still and quiet??
Good comments…Liked Rick’s
“I am convinced that the oversight and administration of education is broken.
And I’m pretty sure from direct observation that not enough parents are engaged with their kids, much less their education.”
Only today; a teen school leaver told me school should start later as kids are not awake until mid to late morning these days. Maybe true for some watching TV or partying with friends until the wee small hours before sleeping! My own family with rotating shift workers certainly retire too late to be “up and at ‘em” in the early morning!
Maybe if it started later it could run later?….but when these days do our children have time free from creches, organised activities and school to just “Be”? Learning to just BE in a changing world, to stop and look at the sky or climb a tree, sit in the grass etc…get creative with sticks and mud and the like … and not to be bored, but to find an occupation is a skill our children need also I think.
(‘All work and no play….?!)