

The Case for Saturday School - tokenadult
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704207504575130073852829574.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_US_News_6

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blintson
Absolutely not. Highschool was by far the least productive time of my life.
I'd have shot a few teachers if I had to put up with them six days a week.

~~~
sketerpot
It was during the _gaps_ in high school that I was able to get any serious
learning done. I had the equivalent of a B.S. in computer science by the time
I got to college. I'm not bragging; I'm condemning a system that makes this
sort of thing so unusual, when in fact it wasn't that hard. All it really took
was enthusiasm and some time in which the school system left me the hell
alone. That last thing was the hardest to get; thank God for study halls and
weekends.

Schools turn learning into a horrible grind. When was the last time you
enjoyed a book that you were forced to read for an English class, even if you
love reading? Or, for my fellow math-enthusiasts: it's fine to learn how to
solve a quadratic equation, but do you really learn anything from doing forty
identical problems instead of five?

People who care about a subject will be an order of magnitude better at
learning it than people who don't care. And the whole school system seems to
be based on the assumption that nobody will ever care.

(Oh, and this doesn't just apply to the top 10% of the class. One of the best
classes in high school was a vocational thing where we built a house. We were
expected to learn how to put up drywall, wire electrical outlets, use power
tools without supervision, and so on, without having a teacher riding our
asses the whole time. People rose to meet that expectation and enjoyed the
class, even the ones who flunked remedial math and carried knives everywhere.)

~~~
baddox
Do you mean you had the functional/operational equivalent of a B.S of computer
science, as in you were as qualified for an entry-level job? Or did you
actually study asymptotic running time, complexity theory, graph theory,
computing theory, and algorithms in your spare time during high school?

~~~
sketerpot
The latter. My understanding of graph and complexity theory was a little weak,
but about on par with what the average CS student actually remembers upon
graduation. _It's not that difficult if you actually care about it._ The great
tragedy is that most people who study things _don't_ care about them. I see
this all the time: in any given subject, the people who think it's interesting
are the people who will learn an order of magnitude faster, and actually
remember it afterward. The ones who go in with the attitude of just grinding
through won't learn nearly as much. This is why I think that the best way to
learn any technical subject is to start on a project you think is cool, and
learn whatever becomes relevant, with enthusiasm. If you start programming,
sooner or later you'll come across this "quicksort" thing and hear that it's
usually "O(n lg n)", whatever that means, and the next thing you know you're
reading through an algorithms textbook of your own volition. It's freaky, but
it works.

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ramidarigaz
My problem with this article is that they assume that school is the best place
to learn things, and that an extra 7-8 hours of what most kids would term
'drudgery' per week would actually improve learning.

I agree with the statement that everything is 10% inspiration and 90%
perspiration, but the perspiration is only useful if a student _wants_ to
perspire.

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petercooper
They should get 37signals in to sort out the schools. I can see the next
book.. ReEducate. I got a sneak peek at the contents. Some highlights:

    
    
      Teach half, not half-ass
      Underdo other teachers
      Learning is overrated
      Enough with “tests”
      Start a career, not an education
      Let your students outgrow you

~~~
warwick
That last one isn't a bad idea. Remember that our teachers are people who are
formally educated in teaching, not necessarily in the subjects which they're
asked to teach.

Especially in the early grades, a teacher has to be a generalist. Students who
take an interest in any given subject will undoubtably know more about it then
their teachers do. This is absolutely worth encouraging.

It's no wonder that students aren't interested in learning if their desire to
learn is suddenly discouraged once they've gotten off the lesson plan.

~~~
sketerpot
I _wish_ more of my students would get off the lesson plan. It's more work,
but _damn_ do they learn fast when they're doing something they find
interesting.

~~~
warwick
What level of student do you teach? I'm curious if they've been conditioned to
not get off the lesson plan because they know it's not worth the effort and it
won't be on the test anyhow.

~~~
sketerpot
I teach introduction to programming for electrical engineering freshmen. There
is no test; only weekly assignments, and I make it clear that they can get off
the lesson plan and get full credit if they do something interesting. I try to
encourage this, and I've never been disappointed by someone who takes me up on
this offer.

But, yeah, a lot of what I do is de-conditioning. For one thing, people need
to get out of the habit of waiting for all knowledge to be spoon-fed to them,
because that's ridiculously inefficient. They need to learn to use the Google
instead of sitting there staring off into space whenever they don't know
something.

It's hard getting people to take a more active role in their own educations
when they've been taught to be so damn passive, but I hear from a lot of
graduating seniors that this was a very influential class for them, for
precisely this reason.

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protomyth
No, heck no. It isn't the number of hours, its the content and the structure
of school. Taking away summer then weekends is two too many insults.

~~~
ktsmith
There are a lot of legitimate reasons to cut out the summer vacation or at
least move to a year round schedule where the breaks are spread out throughout
the year. My wife teaches at a school with a large Hispanic population for
whom English is a second language. These students will often lose a lot of
their progress not only with the typical academics like every student, but
their language progression as well. This means that they are further and
further behind every year. It's even worse for those students that go visit
family in their country of origin over the summer as they speak even less
English while gone. While I personally hate standardized testing, this is one
of the areas most effected by the language skill loss over the summer. It's
difficult to take a test that uses specific academic language when you don't
understand what's being asked, even if you understand how to do the work. This
is especially true with the math word problems they are presented with.

I absolutely agree that going to a six day school week would be terrible.
Given that we are moving steadily towards teaching kids how to take tests they
need that time away from school to learn and grow in other ways. Of course
that requires a lot of parental involvement and/or turning off the tv and
video games. Those are separate issues of course.

~~~
protomyth
I think the added time in school in summer or any year round schedule is
counter productive in other ways. Summer jobs (farming in my end of the
country), camp, outreach programs by colleges, family vacations, and just
being a kid. Setbacks in English are a problem, but having school full time
isn't a good solution. Spending the money that would have been spent keeping
the school open for all on intensive language programs for those who need it
would be a better use of the money. Hire the companies that contract with the
military and State Department. Fix the problems of subgroups with solutions
for subgroups.

~~~
ktsmith
The problem with summer vacation is that it's between 8 and 10 weeks in most
places. During that time the kids lose some of what they learned the previous
year and then more time is wasted at the beginning of the next school year on
review. Certainly there are other things that are beneficial in other ways and
for other reasons that are available in the summer. Let's be honest though,
how many kids are actually doing those things compared to the number of kids
sitting around watching tv, playing video games etc.

Most year round schools in the US simply shift the 8-10 weeks of break into
three smaller breaks. This gives the kids and families time to take their
vacations, go to camps etc. This is better for the children in many cases as
they have less time away from the school in witch to lose those new concepts
that they have learned. Additionally many school districts have managed to use
year round schedules and track systems to service more children from fewer
schools.

Finally, if you look at other industrialized nations that are offering
significantly better educations and having better results with their education
systems you'll find that they don't have these long summer breaks. We are no
longer a farming nation as a whole, and the summer vacation being necessary
for everyone to work in the fields is an outdated concept for the vast
majority of our citizens. I'm not suggesting a reduction in the total time
away from school, though there's an argument for that, simply removing the
single large block during the summer.

~~~
prodigal_erik
> During that time the kids lose some of what they learned the previous year

Shouldn't we train teachers and devise lessons that actually give lasting
knowledge? To me anything less seems like a waste of everyone's time. Shorter
breaks only delay the problem, because eventually the kids are going to
graduate, which is the longest break of all.

~~~
ktsmith
Loss is typically attributed to not using their newly learned skills. Teachers
are constantly being bombarded with new ways to teach things, and new ways to
focus on retention and comprehension. Since this has been a problem for
decades it's logical to deduce that the teaching methods aren't the problem
and the break is.

For adults it might not be that big of a deal to lose the specifics learned in
school as hopefully the ability to learn and tools for learning have stuck.
When you are trying to immediately build on a specific set of skills it can be
a real hindrance to have to reteach things that the student should already
know, but has lost because they didn't use it for 10 weeks. This may not even
be that big of a problem for older students, but at the grade school level we
are wasting the kids time by having to reteach things.

------
jerf
Problem: What we're doing isn't work.

Solution: Do the same, _only more!_

Why is that always the answer? (Rhetorical question.)

~~~
sketerpot
They cite better test scores from countries like China and India and Japan.
The impression I get from talking with people who went to school in those
countries is that the system made them _very_ qualified to score well on the
all-important tests, but that's hardly high praise.

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rubyrescue
Corporate culture has become a resonator of low-level fearfulness to such an
extent that we gladly throw huge numbers of our fellow human beings in jail,
just as we abandon our children to penal institutionalization in schools; the
constant presentation of prison as our salvation, or school as the essential
trainer of children, makes us all prisoners. It corrupts our inner life, it
divides us from one another so that relationships lifelong are thin and
shallow. School teaches us to divorce one another, to put aside loyalty for
advantage, to quell our inner voices, subordinating them to management.

School and prison do the work that Rome's first emperor, Julius Cesear, said
was necessary to manage a conquered population. In order to keep the conquered
conquered, you have to keep them divided. School classrooms do that job more
gently than prison cells, but they do it more effectively.

\-- John Gatto (former Public School Teacher)

~~~
dgordon
I thought that was John Gatto halfway through the first sentence -- admittedly
a long sentence.

It is a truth generally overlooked that gentle admonition can destroy
ambition, enthusiasm, and dreams of a world better than this one more
efficiently than whips and iron bars ever did.

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sketerpot
> Just as important, although most youngsters are self-motivated when it comes
> to what Kaiser terms "entertainment media," far fewer will take the
> initiative to learn more geometry or rules of grammar on their own.

Funny they should bring up grammar. I never paid attention when English
classes tried to teach grammar at me. I just absorbed it from books,
osmotically. I did this voluntarily, and so did every kid who's ever picked up
a Harry Potter book to find out what all the fuss is about. After that, every
English class before college was redundant. It's easier when it's fun. Schools
are going about this all wrong; if they can make people enjoy reading, half
their problems would vanish.

So here's a modest proposal: have reading classes in which people are
encouraged to read anything, and given a selection of stuff that a lot of
people like. Harry Potter, Twilight (hold your nose; it's popular), Heinlein,
steamy romance novels, _whatever_. And make sure some of it is sexually
explicit; not only does sex sell, but it's probably going to be a much more
mature treatment of the subject than the kids will hear from their friends.
Devote at least an hour each day (preferably more) to reading, and during this
time, leave the students alone. Don't assign a schedule, don't test for
reading comprehension, don't be a dick; just let them read whatever they want.
I predict that this will _easily_ do more to improve language skills than
Saturday classes or abolishing summer break.

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nfnaaron
I searched but couldn't find info on time spent in school across nations that
included Finland.

Why Finland? I "heard" somewhere that Finnish students spend less time in
school, and/or on homework, than American students.

Why Finland? This chart:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Stu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment#Results)

2000, Reading Literacy: #1 Finland, #15 United States

2003, Mathematics: #1 Finland, #24 United States

2006, Science: #1 Finland, #21 ah fuckit

This other WSJ article looks at how Finland does education:

[http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120425355065601...](http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120425355065601997.html)

There's really too much to quote, but here's something really embarrassing. A
Finnish exchange student, who went to school in America for a year, was forced
to repeat that year when she got home. Ouch.

More time spent in a failing school system is not going to fix the school
system. Something from what Finland and other countries are doing, regardless
of hours, is probably closer to what we need.

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Tichy
The fallacy is considering "academic performance" to be meaningful.

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noarchy
Do people really think that the model of "Schools as factories" will work? The
next step will be to increase the number of hours per day, after Saturday
school fails to give the anticipated results.

~~~
spamizbad
They're already increasing the hours per day - in mandatory study halls and
afterschool reading programs. Hour wise, there's not much more room to grow.
Good luck convincing parents they're kids need to stay in school beyond
5:30pm.

The "good" news is that this is largely unsustainable as you've got to pay
teachers, admin staff, transportation, and provide supplies for all these
ambitious activities education reformers keep dreaming up. Schools are
strapped for cash as-is. Hell, my old Highschool currently shuts off most
building lights in between classroom periods to save on energy costs. This
isn't done because the district is trying to be green: it's being done because
it's broke.

Ultimately sheer economics will prevent 6-day/10+ hour school days from being
implemented nation-wide.

~~~
dgordon
Have the worse-off schools dump their football teams and you'd be financially
OK for quite a few supposedly ambitious activities, but that won't happen in
many places.

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steve19
The education you receive at school has little to do with the curriculum in
the classroom.

You learn socialization skills, learning skills and interaction with the
opposite sex etc. etc. This has been discussed many times on HN.

Education inflation is pointless. These kids are not going to perform better
in the workplace or get better grades at college.

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euroclydon
Did this prick ever consider that maybe my kids don't want to flush their
lives away as fodder in a commercial cold war with China?

