The upside to my disastrous first year was that I got to learn how hard it is to raise a GPA in the remaining 3 years !!! A good lesson in weighted averages.
Now that I have your attention, this not the type of party school that I want to talk about today. No, today I am interested in your thoughts regarding Elementary school parties. I keep running into people that want to encourage students in reading, writing, math, etc by holding class wide parties. They seem to believe that doing this often is beneficial. Whereas I believe it is squandering some of the precious few academic hours that teachers and students have.
My simple math is that there are only ~935 academic hours in a year. (~5.5 hrs/day and ~170 days) (5.5 = 6.5 - 1 for recess, lunch, transitions, etc) Then it is probably under 900 academic hours if you take out the Teacher's fun in-class activities, School assemblies, Seasonal parties, Pictures, Health screening, Sub Teacher days, etc.
Now I want the kids to somewhat enjoy school, however I think:
- The remaining ~5.2 hrs / day should be dedicated to the teacher student academic process of teaching and learning.
- The Teacher has enough to do without people interrupting their time, flow and methods.
- The Students need all the lecture and study time they can get to cover the vast amount of content.
- Though Students require some extrinsic motivation, it can be overdone. They must develop their intrinsic motivation also, and this will not be accomplished through parties.
Should Elementary Schools be one big fun time party with some learning?
Should they be an enjoyable place of academic learning?
Should they be all academics and less fun?
What else am I missing?
3 comments:
I agree that the teachers could come up with better incentives than class parties. Or at least put a limit on them.
The thing that bothers me is the fact that Robbinsdale School District only has 170 school days, that's the minimum days allowed by MN and far lower than other MN school districts. Why is that?
Also Minnesota's minimum school day requirement is less than many other states. I wonder why.
Based on talking to school administrators, the number of school days is purely a budget issue. One of them really wants a longer year in RAS in order to help the challenged children catch up.
Unfortunately teacher pay and other school costs seem to be calculated by the day. Therefore if you add 20 days, most of the costs would go up by ~12%. {ie (190-170)/170} On a $130 million budget that would be ~$15 million/yr.
This is why many districts are going to 4 day weeks. Which has got to be the worst thing I have heard of with regard to education in a long time. Just what a young energetic student needs, fewer longer days... Can we spell student BURN OUT and INEFFICIENCY.
As for parties, I agree that the teachers should have the final call in the classroom. Unfortunately sometimes parents and administrators seem to think they know better. It is interesting to observe people.
Many times, the party incentive comes not from teachers or principals as rewards for learning (which at least has some merit, but I agree they could be more creative about incentives), but from the parent groups raising money. Such as, the class that sells the most Happenings books, coupons, cookie dough, wrapping paper, bread sticks, pancake breakfast tickets, . . . . gets a pizza, popcorn, . . . party. Sometimes these are one party per school, sometimes the winning class in each grade gets the party. Particularly in elementary school, there are LOTS of fundraisers, thus LOTS of parties.
How about a movement next school year to hold all fundraisers without a party incentive and see if there is much, if any, difference in the results?
Several years ago the Federal gov't issued some report/ruling/I forget what it was called about schools and food, with one goal of many being to discourage using food as an incentive. After that report was released our district approved a policy that discourages food as an incentive. No mandate, just a suggestion. Both the Feds and school district were coming from the "chunky student" perspective, not the "how few minutes of school our students actually have for learning" perspective.
Food for thought.
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