School days for young kids should be shorter and more focused

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m confused about the people asserting that the current school day is 6 hours long. I’ve worked in three elementary schools and the shortest day was 7 hours, with my current school day clocking in at 7.5 hours long. The upper elementary students fare better, with productivity dropping around 2:00. Their day ends at 3:30. The younger students are a mess after lunch. Some of the kids come back crying, some are hyped up and sweaty, some kids are covered in mud. . .you get the picture. Imagine visiting the park with your six year old and telling them they could play with ALL their friends, but only for fifteen minutes. Then you corral 100 of them inside at once and tell them it’s time to focus on writing. That’s recess. What can you expect?
The school day would be shorter if we structured the days the way they do in Europe, with activities in the afternoon (run by a different team of people) but parents here would never agree to it. Whether they accomplished the same amount of academic instruction and practice or not would probably be irrelevant to public opinion. I don’t think things will ever change.

How much time do the kids take for lunch and recess? How much time is transition?

That's how you get to 6 hours.

That’s like saying you’re going to stop wasting time feeding your kids breakfast and getting them ready for school so you can get out the door in five minutes. It doesn’t make any logical sense and it takes time to transition between activities. You can’t subtract the time that it takes to prepare things, move from place to place, change clothes, eat, use the bathroom, or any of the other necessary but menial activities that we complete every day. The school day is still nearly eight hours long, regardless of how long it takes the kids to pack their backpacks.

Agreed, and the way the school and the day is structured can really impact how much time and energy is spent on transitions. For instance, at our current school (which we are working to make our former school for a variety of reasons including this), lunch is done on a strict rotating schedule with very little room for error, and then kids get recess after lunch on that same schedule. The school's layout sucks and my kid is currently in "the annex" which of course is about as far from the cafeteria as possible. This means my kid's class spends a good 20-30 minutes "transitioning" to lunch, because that's how long it takes to get 20 kindergarteners to the other side of the building with all their lunch stuff and into seats and eating. The other classes have similar issues. So what happens literally every day is that lunch does not start on time, for anyone, and kids wind up spending time standing around in the hallway waiting for the prior group to finish so that they can go inside and eat, and that pushes back their recess time. So about every 3 out of 5 days, my kid doesn't get outdoor recess because there isn't time, because she's spent the better part of an hour standing around in various lines or walking down hallways so that she can eat her lunch in the room she is supposed to eat it in the order she is supposed to eat it according to the school schedule.

It's not acceptable. The fact that crap like this is why my kid's school day is 8 hours long absolutely makes me want a different approach to school that might take less time but focuses more on how kids' experience the day and what will best facilitate learning and enjoying school (enjoying school is actually really important for student retention and helps decrease truancy and behavioral issues). A 3.5 hour school day where kids don't spend any time standing around in hallways waiting to be let into rooms, followed by a lunch and recess that can be longer and more relaxed, followed by an afternoon focused on arts, outdoor learning, physical activity, socio-emotional learning, and just play (all of which currently gets shoehorned into the margins of my child's 8 hour school day because they are at the bottom of the priorities list), sounds about perfect. And there is no reason, other than lack of will and disinterest in the experiences of children, that we can't do this in the US.

[Anonymous]

That’s basically my K’s schedule at his private K-8. Academics in the morning, broken up by recess. Lunch followed by specials and SEL. Only problem is there is one academic block (math) which is in the afternoon. It is his least favorite subject since he is tired by then :-/ I wish they could switch it up so it wouldn’t always be math in the afternoon.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Okay so how much is this aftercare going to cost? Sounds like a way to shift things to parents. The rich kids and then the poor kids (who get it free) get to take art, language, PE. Middle class kids just go to whatever aftercare they can afford or grandma picks them up.

I disagree with your assertion that school is too long. Most only run 8-3 anyways.

I think 8-3 is too long for early elementary. I loved my kids’ morning preschool. They got to learn and play with peers, have lunch at home, play at a playground or in the backyard in the afternoon, and I could cook dinner, get them bathed, and asleep by 7:30. I could then have a couple hours to be with my husband. Those were the days!

My kids are in bed at 8pm on school nights and they're upper elementary. There's no reason you can't do this with a full school day.

This isn't about the kids, it's about the parent. This poster wants her kids in bed and asleep so she can have time alone with her husband.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I recently learned that kids in many places around the world only go to school for half days through much of elementary. Like it's common to go to school from 8:30am to 12:30 or 1:30pm in many countries, including Scandinavia and much of Western Europe. You can get some idea here: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/02/school-days-how-the-u-s-compares-with-other-countries/

As a parent of a child in early elementary, this makes so much sense to me. So much of their school day is filler (shuffling between classrooms, lining up in hallways, etc.) and with these little kids, the time in the afternoon spent on academics is probably not that useful because they are tired and unfocused by then. My child often does special like music, forcing language and art for part of the morning, which results in more transition time getting to and from the special, and also means that more academics are pushed to after lunch when kids are tired.

I like the idea of a more compressed school day with less random filler -- let the kids spend the entire morning in one class room with the same teacher, focusing pretty exclusively on academic subjects. Then send them to lunch, and then aftercare starts and that when you get in music, art, PE, etc. It just makes obvious sense. The idea of a 7-8 hour school day for a kid who is 6 or 7 just does not make sense.

If we did this, we could also start shifting a lot of the stuff that teachers now get tasked with to the looser after care environment. The social emotional learning, the focused help for high risk kids who need extra interventions. etc. would all likely be better provided in an after-care environment instead of during the school day when kids are already focused on academic concepts.

Studies also show that there are seriously diminishing returns when it comes to knowledge acquisition over long periods of time, and that more mental breaks actually helps with knowledge retention.

Why not just change how we do school so the afternoons are like aftercare? Oh wait, we won’t fund the staffing and space required for that

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m confused about the people asserting that the current school day is 6 hours long. I’ve worked in three elementary schools and the shortest day was 7 hours, with my current school day clocking in at 7.5 hours long. The upper elementary students fare better, with productivity dropping around 2:00. Their day ends at 3:30. The younger students are a mess after lunch. Some of the kids come back crying, some are hyped up and sweaty, some kids are covered in mud. . .you get the picture. Imagine visiting the park with your six year old and telling them they could play with ALL their friends, but only for fifteen minutes. Then you corral 100 of them inside at once and tell them it’s time to focus on writing. That’s recess. What can you expect?
The school day would be shorter if we structured the days the way they do in Europe, with activities in the afternoon (run by a different team of people) but parents here would never agree to it. Whether they accomplished the same amount of academic instruction and practice or not would probably be irrelevant to public opinion. I don’t think things will ever change.

How much time do the kids take for lunch and recess? How much time is transition?

That's how you get to 6 hours.

That’s like saying you’re going to stop wasting time feeding your kids breakfast and getting them ready for school so you can get out the door in five minutes. It doesn’t make any logical sense and it takes time to transition between activities. You can’t subtract the time that it takes to prepare things, move from place to place, change clothes, eat, use the bathroom, or any of the other necessary but menial activities that we complete every day. The school day is still nearly eight hours long, regardless of how long it takes the kids to pack their backpacks.

Agreed, and the way the school and the day is structured can really impact how much time and energy is spent on transitions. For instance, at our current school (which we are working to make our former school for a variety of reasons including this), lunch is done on a strict rotating schedule with very little room for error, and then kids get recess after lunch on that same schedule. The school's layout sucks and my kid is currently in "the annex" which of course is about as far from the cafeteria as possible. This means my kid's class spends a good 20-30 minutes "transitioning" to lunch, because that's how long it takes to get 20 kindergarteners to the other side of the building with all their lunch stuff and into seats and eating. The other classes have similar issues. So what happens literally every day is that lunch does not start on time, for anyone, and kids wind up spending time standing around in the hallway waiting for the prior group to finish so that they can go inside and eat, and that pushes back their recess time. So about every 3 out of 5 days, my kid doesn't get outdoor recess because there isn't time, because she's spent the better part of an hour standing around in various lines or walking down hallways so that she can eat her lunch in the room she is supposed to eat it in the order she is supposed to eat it according to the school schedule.

It's not acceptable. The fact that crap like this is why my kid's school day is 8 hours long absolutely makes me want a different approach to school that might take less time but focuses more on how kids' experience the day and what will best facilitate learning and enjoying school (enjoying school is actually really important for student retention and helps decrease truancy and behavioral issues). A 3.5 hour school day where kids don't spend any time standing around in hallways waiting to be let into rooms, followed by a lunch and recess that can be longer and more relaxed, followed by an afternoon focused on arts, outdoor learning, physical activity, socio-emotional learning, and just play (all of which currently gets shoehorned into the margins of my child's 8 hour school day because they are at the bottom of the priorities list), sounds about perfect. And there is no reason, other than lack of will and disinterest in the experiences of children, that we can't do this in the US.

There are several reasons. If every grade had your ideal schedule you wouldn’t be able to staff that many arts teachers just for half a day at a time. You wouldn’t have enough classroom or outdoor space for the afternoons either.

[Anonymous]

Op, I think what you want is private, but it costs $$

[Anonymous]

OP has a couple of choices:

-move to a country with a shorter school day (because US schools won't do this, and even if she tried to lobby for it, the school system would outlast her and her kids would be in HS before it could ever happen - but it won't)

-pay for a mythical private school relatively close to where she's living and pay more for less school

-get over it

[Anonymous]

Agreed OP. Young kids cortisol levels reach stressed levels in all day programs.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2946618/

The thing is (and any teacher or low income parent cat attest) we don’t organize our society around the needs of children for optimal development. We just blame teachers and women when things don’t go well.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Also, the compressed schedule is being pushed by the teachers (for their convenience) and hurts kid's learning. A longer school day with breaks and outdoor time is more pedagogically advantageous. Half-day school schedules also hurt work-life balance, particularly for women, and require more of the family's budget to cover the afternoon time, or forces women to work part-time (again, limiting women's participation in the workforce).

Another thing to blame on teachers. The length of the school day. Ridiculous.

[Anonymous]

Well I guess school should just keep being bad for kids. What was I thinking, wanting to improve it? Silly me.

Y’all are depressing.

[Anonymous]

The problems kids are having have little to do with the #of hours kids are in school. The number of hours has been status for decades. Perhaps it is the environment and culture changes, both in the school and outside of the school, that is the issue.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP has a couple of choices:

-move to a country with a shorter school day (because US schools won't do this, and even if she tried to lobby for it, the school system would outlast her and her kids would be in HS before it could ever happen - but it won't)

-pay for a mythical private school relatively close to where she's living and pay more for less school

-get over it

There's also home school, if your work schedule is flexible enough and you work from home. Once a kid can read this is a real possibility.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am not sure how much focus a young child could have for an entire morning of academics.

This... OP, it is highly unlikely a class of lower elementary students would do any better by spending an entire morning in one room with essentially no breaks from academics.
I suggest you spend 3+ hours in one room with 20+ kindergarteners teaching reading, math, etc only every day for a week and then get back to us.

1st grade in Germany goes to school from 8 - 11:15, has a break, does art, PE, and music.
As the kids get older, some days school goes to 12:15 or 1, with more breaks added.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Also, the compressed schedule is being pushed by the teachers (for their convenience) and hurts kid's learning. A longer school day with breaks and outdoor time is more pedagogically advantageous. Half-day school schedules also hurt work-life balance, particularly for women, and require more of the family's budget to cover the afternoon time, or forces women to work part-time (again, limiting women's participation in the workforce).

So it all comes down to school as childcare, not what's best for the kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Also, the compressed schedule is being pushed by the teachers (for their convenience) and hurts kid's learning. A longer school day with breaks and outdoor time is more pedagogically advantageous. Half-day school schedules also hurt work-life balance, particularly for women, and require more of the family's budget to cover the afternoon time, or forces women to work part-time (again, limiting women's participation in the workforce).

So it all comes down to school as childcare, not what's best for the kids.

We have been telling you school is just glorified daycare forever. Yes, duh! If anything, parents would like kids warehoused from 7a to 7p and have an option to include dinner so all they have to do is wash them up and put them to bed. Why even have kids at that point????