Ch 12 of 20: Bell Schedule

Frustrated teachers and administrators are trying to figure out what is wrong with their school’s performance. Low performing schools, like many of the ones I see, are banging their heads against the wall trying to break the standardized test score barrier to get their school off the hook. They research methods other schools are using, calling staff from different areas in a desperate attempt to find out what is the secret magic that brings their scores higher.

I was sitting in those meeting many times, listening to my colleagues arguing for one method or another. One person is claiming that a certain technique worked so well somewhere, resulting in a higher score, and someone else presenting just the opposite, arguing that another school, using that same technique, sees no progress.

This is the time when I am waiting for that innocent child, who sees the facts as they are and speaks out the truth… to cry “The Emperor is naked!” pointing to reality that everyone pretends not to notice… The fact that, for example, this wonderful, high performing school, is in a privileged area, with well educated and well to do population, and long waiting list that efforts losing few trouble makers, and thus pressuring students and parents – to meet their standards or hit the road…

When I am assigned to a new school and I want to get a feeling for its academic rank and culture, I always check its bell schedule…

My good colleagues at the west area schools enjoy a relaxed bell schedule. They start at 8:00, have about 50 minutes-long classes, enjoy nutrition recess, unwind for 35 minutes at lunch break, have a nice 7 minutes passing time between periods - the same schedule that they have had for 20 years…

The stressed out schools start before 8:00, have no nutrition recess, shorter lunch, mean 4 minutes passing period, and the greatest “fix-it-all” - block scheduling…

If you have taught math at a low-performing school with block scheduling you know what I mean… I am not saying it is a bad idea all together – it might work for art, music, PE, even social studies, but not math, for more than one reason. To start - there is no way you can keep students’ attention for more than 40 minutes, in the best case; 20 minutes to teach the lesson and 20 minutes for practice, collectively and individually. After that they lose they concentration and become restless and impatient. So – how do you fill 90 minutes, or worse, 110 minutes?

Yes, you can show them a movie, talk to them about current events, teach them about the world (my favorite passing time activity…) but the fact is still the same – there is that much material that you have to cover each week, month, semester.  Since you now meet your class only 2 or 3 times a week you have to give double dose of the material in each meeting. It means that after the first 40 minutes, with maybe a short break, you have to do another round of 40 minutes teaching the next section. Learning math is challenging enough as it is, and to have it absorbed and ready to be applied – it needs to be administered in a bite size… Dealing with two mouthful quantities to be swallowed, digested, and processed is quite impossible!

School age youngsters need to move around, spend energy, play and refresh their minds before being ready to absorb more learning. Long periods in the same seat is almost impossible for most students, especially for middle schoolers. The notion that more is better, resulting in maximizing the in-class minutes, especially in low-performing schools, is ineffective, and even counter-effective! More and more researches are showing that recess is not only what students want, but also what students need in order to perform well. Studies had proved that outside, playground, time, helps students refresh their minds, exhaust their energy and prepares them for refocusing their mind on learning. Furthermore – researchers found a direct positive correlation between exercise and academic performance! Countries that excel in education level, like Finland and some Asian countries, have shorter periods and longer, and more often, recesses!

Unfortunately, education leaders believe that fixing our failing schools depends on how many classroom minutes we provide our learners, and the tighter the schedule is, the better education we deliver. Not surprisingly, then, that low performing schools squeeze seven periods a day, some in block schedule, have short or no breaks, and very brief passing periods. They administer remedy without a sound proof that it cures the ailment, and ignore the fact that while no real evidence supports that more is better, volume of data claims that actually less is better!

In analyzing the consequence of bell and block scheduling, we weigh mainly students’ achievements, of course. We do forget, however, to consider its effect on teachers. Teachers’ comfort and well being has a direct impact on their job effectiveness, not to mention those basic human rights of a working individual…

Let’s talk about lunch break, for example. Lunch breaks are never long enough to enable teachers to recharge before the next section of the day. When the bell-ring announces lunch break, the students charge out instantly, but the teacher has some closing to do - erase the board, turn off electronic devices, pick up few papers from the floor, maybe replace the materials - getting ready for the next period, and very often exchange few words with some students for one reason or another; precious minutes that are taken away from his/her recess time…

At one school we had block scheduling with 110 minutes long blocks, a nightmare for every math teacher in a low performing school… The morning session included two consecutive blocks with only 7 minutes between them… If you were not one of the lucky teachers with a conference before lunch, or the bathrooms were not next door, you were doomed to work four hours without a bathroom break…

At another school we had a 30-minutes lunch break. Because of school size, and the fact that bathrooms were not available at the bungalows where I taught, I could never get to the cafeteria until almost the end of the break. By then the cafeteria workers had already remove most of the food items, closed the cashiers and most infuriating - emptied the coffee pots. If there is something I desperately needed at that time, is a good cup of coffee, but as I, at last, reached the promised cafeteria, I would watch with dismay how my precious coffee is being poured down the drain…

Other schools don’t even have faculty cafeteria so teachers have to waste precious lunch minutes standing in line with the students (yeah… they do get priority) and then waste more time marching to the teachers’ lounge… not much fun…

It almost feels like the whole school time machine is aimed at limiting teachers’ comfort and causing them a constant race against time. If you have a conference period with important business to take care of, you are asked to cover another class. If you get to school early because you need to do some prep work, someone needs your help. If you plan on leaving early – forget it! And if you get to the cafeteria, desperately needing few minutes to eat and relax, they reject your $20 bill that you carefully remembered to bring (cash only! no checks or credit card!)

So, stepping to a school, not knowing much about its academic level, culture and intensity of teachers’ pressure – check out the bell schedule… This is a good indicator for school’s stress level…

Links:
The Secret Behind Finland's Super Smart School Kids? Recess
The Effect of Recess on Academics
The Rebirth of Recess

Ch 11 of 20: Middle School

Muppet: Nobody Cares About Me

The Middle School phenomenon has caused, in my opinion, more damage to the education system than any other “progressive” reform. It had emerged several decades ago, here, and later in other countries, from a previous system dividing the elementary / high school system into three stages, adding a Junior High School. The Junior High concept was created to escalate students’ academic preparedness for the higher grades by breaking away from the traditional elementary school, and provide thus more rigorous studies, as a better readiness for higher education.

It was in the early seventies when academia people started to wonder if it is right to enforce strict academic measures on early teens, and therefore limit their time and ability for creativity and socializing. Combined with new psychological theories a new trend surfaced that resulted in easing academic demands on young adolescents, trying to create a warmer transition from elementary to high school. 

Some countries around the world, and few districts here in the States, however, stayed with the Junior-Senior concept, and even smaller number of organizations kept the eight –four, elementary high-school, system long after it was pronounced “old fashion”. Those few “survivors” can smile now and say “See - we told you…”

Luckily, I grew up in a country that, at the time, kept the 1-8 elementary and 9-12 high school system. Back then my young country was one of the world’s leaders on the education rank list, and it produced a genius generation of engineers and inventors in every field. Its place on the list dropped miserably after adapting some “progressive methods”, one of them is the middle school system… It is not my place to debate what caused the education level drop, and what part of it is due to adapting the middle school system. All I can do is describe my own experience…

I can testify to having the best time of my schooling life during those last three years of my elementary school, especially those critical 7th and 8th grades. We all grew up together, started to mature together, and made room for the emerging stars among us. We didn't have to re-invent a social structure and fight our place in it. We were comfortable in our world of being the seniors in our little kingdom, and thus our minds were free to absorb and progress. Now, years later, I realize that my best childhood and adolescence friends are those who were part of my world during those precious years of 12 to 14…

Raising my kids here, and sending them to the local, well acclaimed, schools, I watched with dismay their experience going through the middle school horrid system. My daughter, an ‘A’ student, shy and delicate, spent most of her lunch breaks by herself, and was trying to get involved in any school activity that could save her from a social isolation. My son, who could have been an ‘A’ students had he not been caught in the middle-school madness, was desperately trying to prove the cool guy in the new, chaotic, social structure in order to socially survive…

Being the foreign, new comer, that I was, I did not grasp the harm in the middle-school insanity until years later, too late, by then, to mend the scars that were left.

Yet, still not fully comprehending the whole picture, I decided to become a middle school math teacher, believing that my skills will be best used teaching arithmetic and those ill-understood concepts of fractions, decimals and percentages… It was only when I actually started teaching that I realized how impossible it is to teach anything in middle school, let alone mathematics...

What’s amiss in middle schools?

It is absolutely the wrong structure, at the wrong age…

The first time I was faced with a system that required me to choose classes and move from one classroom to another I was at my freshman year of the university. We were all so confused that we thought we will never be able to graduate… and most of us were over twenty by then… Of course it is not quite the same, yet I can’t imagine facing a similar system at the age of eleven, after being under the clear, strict care of the elementary school organization for five or six years…

Pre and young teens are at an age when they need structure and direction more than ever. Unfortunately, right at that fragile age we open the gates for them and let them free to go to an uncharted territory. All of a sudden the cushioning and protection given to them at elementary school is let go, and the rules abruptly change on them; Moving from one classroom to another, with anonymous new teacher in every class, and hundreds of new faces almost every period of the day.

The social structure that was carefully balanced for that many years is undone exactly at that sensitive time when early teen boys are becoming young men and girls are turning to women. The old social arrangement does not apply anymore and every young soul has to fight for a new place in the pyramid. No wonder that this is when alcohol and drugs are creeping their way into the young people’s life.   

To counter-act the breaking of the social structure, and to support peer cooperation rather than competition, group work became the common practice in most middle schools classrooms. Students sitting in groups of 3-6, ideally learning together and helping each other… Sounds great? The idea is good. Does it work? For social interaction – maybe, for academic progress – not quite…  The middle school concept that was trying to ease students’ academic stress and leave more room for socializing and creativity, affords them complete leisure and laziness.

Over the past several years, the middle-school system is desperately trying to re-invent itself, as more and more researches are proving its failure. Schools are trying to have one teacher teaching several subjects to strengthen teacher-students connection. A typical combination is one teacher for math and science, and one for social sciences and language arts. However, due to budget and logistics limitations, other, strange, combinations exist like English and math or English and Science …

For that purpose, block scheduling is often prescribed, where students spend two hours, without a break, in the classroom; a nightmare for teachers and students…

Then there is the “Home Room” or “Advisory” period. In most high schools it means 5-10 minutes added to first or second period, dedicated to messages over the laud-speakers and some administrative errands. In a middle school, however, this special period is dedicated to teacher-students quality time, sort of bonding together, time for general education, on top of administrative errands. This period lasts between 30 to 60 minutes every day, but unfortunately is an absolute waste of time. When asked what they usually do during this time, students’ answer is always the same – "Nothing!" In the best case a teacher would assign a word-search or a game… Really? Nothing better to do with 40 precious minutes? No real learning? No discussions? Nothing to broaden those limited horizons? And if nothing better, why not add 5-10 minutes to each of the other academic periods?

Then, just recently, another “academic” activity was added… Breakfast In Class… another mind blowing invention… Why not have students come 10 minutes earlier and be served at the cafeteria, where it belongs? Why waste class time! Not to mention the trash, the disrupted learning atmosphere, the questionable added duty for teachers, the waste of food that big part of it finds its way to the trash can!

I don’t want to further expand on the middle school system. Educators understand the problems and try to provide small changes within the limitations of the system. Teachers are well aware of the situation; some deal with it somehow, but many leave to seek a job in a high school, or just quit the education field all together.  

Why don’t we go back to the old system? Politics… and money of course… someone has to admit failure and someone has to pay for it…