Reply to School days for young kids should be shorter and more focused

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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. [/quote]

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

That's how you get to 6 hours.[/quote]
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. [/quote]

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.[/quote]

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