Carnival of Email #6: Summer Vacation Edition

Dear daughter had another test with the audiologist this morning which began with a screaming, crying fit. She's had a thing about anyone in the medical profession since her trip to the pediatric opthamologist last January to get her eyes checked for CMV; the pupil dilation and light shining in her eyes didn't go over well at all. I'm hoping she gets over things before too awful long, because she's got a loooong road ahead of her when it comes to doctors.

On with the carnival!

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The Omaha World-Herald highlights an outdoor garden that an area school put together with a grant from Lowe's. There's a bare patch at my school that I think would be perfect for a giant greenhouse, complete with outdoor classroom; if I ever need another big project in life, I might go for it.

Science Daily with some important new research on nutrition:

Adults who had improved nutrition in early childhood may score better on intellectual tests, regardless of the number of years they attended school, according to a new article.

This probably speaks to the importance of school breakfast and lunch programs for children from low-SES families.

In Tennessee they've picked up on Marguerite Roza's research and are up in arms over the fact that more experienced teachers tend to go gravitate towards better schools. They're looking at ideas like "combat pay" to solve the perceived problem; it could be an interesting process to watch.

If you show your ass during your high school graduation, I don't have a lot of pity for you. The "Hey, look at me!" mentality is one that I've never really been able to understand.

The San Francisco Chronicle talks about the importance of expanding the school day for kids who are struggling in the classroom. I think we're not far away from a reckoning when it comes to the structure of the school day and school year; the systemic flaws become more and more pronounced every day.

Teaching the Bible as an elective is OK in Texas after action by their state Board of Education. It's about time; the separation of church and state aside, knowledge of the Bible is a Rosetta Stone for understanding thousands of works of literature, film, TV, etcetera.

In the District, Michelle Rhee is looking at creating more preschool-through-8th grade schools, pointing to a research base that shows pre-8 buildings work better for middle school aged kids. There's competing evidence from Philadelphia, though, that the model Rhee's relying on is flawed. It could be an interesting one to watch.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has started a new blog, VP Watch, where they'll be talking about the search for a good vice-president to go along with Obama and McCain. I'm sad that Jim Webb has recently taken himself out of the running.

Colleges are having a Mexican standoff with Margaret Spellings, the Secretary of Education. She says do this or else; they say that the end is near and make raspberry sounds in her general direction. The thing about lame ducks is that their quacking often goes unnoticed. More here.

Finally, ESchool News has introduced some new sidebar widgets that people can use to spiffy up their blogs. I'm considering adding one over to my sidebar, just for the sake of trying something new.

Thanks for reading!

Read more here, if any.

There was time now. There was all the time I needed....

I award 10 “I Thought a Think Points” to any of you who get that.

I got my new issue of the Harvard Education Letter in the mail a couple of days ago, and the back page article by Richard Elmore is an interesting one. He argues that nearly three thousand hours of instructional time is lost over the course of a student’s school career because of inefficiencies in how the school day and year are structured. Testing takes a hit because it’s not new instructional time; he similarly criticizes the “end-of-year letdown” for needlessly letting contact time go to waste.

He’s right, the time is wasted.

He’s hopeless, because there’s not a whole lot that can be done about the situation.

My kids start showing up in the morning at about 8:45; we walk out to the busses at 3:15. That’s 6.5 hours I have to use, but there’s an hour off of the top for the midday lunch and recess time. You can also assume 15 minutes at the beginning and end of the day to either get the kids settled or get them ready to go. We typically take about a 15 minute break every morning, because I have no preps in the morning and they need the chance to cut loose. That’s 1 hour and 45 minutes of time gone, leaving 4:45 for teaching.

Except that I have an average of 45 minutes a day of prep time, so that knocks the total time down to four hours a day for teaching time. An educated guess would be that I lose another half hour a day through things like walking the kids to their specialist classes, transitioning between activities, and the like, so in a 6.5 hour day I really only have 3 hours of instructional time. Troubling? Perhaps, but it’s the way it is.

So how do we make more instructional time? Some schools are cutting recess and the arts, which is a profound mistake on either end, but I can understand the instinct. At my own school we’ve made a change from offering band AND music to 5th and 6th graders, to giving them a choice between band OR music. They still get something, just not as much as they used to. They were losing two hours a week of instruction because not every kid was in band, but you couldn’t teach new skills solely to the kids who were left behind when the band kids were gone, so it was wasted time.

But if you look at the time lost to processes, there really isn’t a way to get that back. My kids are going to take 15 minutes to get ready to go—that’s just the way it is with 6 year olds. At the beginning of the day the kids trickle in during a 20-minute window instead of all showing up at the same time, and there’s nothing I can do as a classroom teacher to fix that problem, either. I could try to shore up the 30 minutes of time that we lose over the course of the day during our transitions, but there really is only so much I can do there, too.

Maybe, just maybe, we need to think about extending the school day. It’s what they do in KIPP and a bunch of other charter schools, and it’s certainly what some kids need. This month’s issue of District Administration magazine has an article about the idea of IEPs for every child; imagine what we could do with all the kids from the highest to the lowest with one extra hour a day.

It can’t happen, because of finances.
It can’t happen, because of the contract.
It can’t happen, because of the kids.
It can’t happen, because of the parents.

But if it could....

Read more here, if any.