It is this time of the year, again, when you feel that you just barely started to enjoy summer
vacation, and realize it already ended; time to start all over again…
Looks like no one is used to the new school schedule of starting
mid-August; parents, teachers and especially students are not ready yet. I, for
sure, am not. I still enjoy my time at home, sitting at my patio, drinking
coffee. My plans for going out, seeing people, enjoying a shopping spree, are
yet to be fulfilled…
We all grew up with the concept that summer months are for summer
vacation; cooling at the beach or by the swimming pool during the hot long days,
spending extended evenings with friends and family, the day light lasts into
the late hours…
When September would roll in, somehow, magically, the weather
would signal that it is time to go back to work. The first days of September be
cooler all of a sudden, autumn would be in the air, and you would feel that yes,
this is the right time.
Of course the reason for summer vacation had to do with hot
days at times when schools had no air-conditioning, which made teaching and
learning too hard. Now, with inside comfy temperature, there is no real reason
why not starting school early.
The main logical reason to start school early is completing the
first semester by the holidays and winter vacation. When schools used to start
in September, the first semester ended a month after winter vacation, making it
hard to maintain continuity. It does make better sense to complete the semester
before the holidays.
But there are other ways to deal with this situation. Schools
used to have trimester system, instead of semester. The first trimester would
end by the winter break, second by spring break and the third by summer, a
system that makes sense too…
I would claim that this is a better system, for students, for
teachers, as well as for schools. The way it is set up now, teachers have to go
through eight grading periods a year, every quarter of a semester, meaning
every five weeks. A person who is not a teacher cannot grasp the academic and
administrative work load that it entails… Entering grades to a computerized
system that is never as reliable or as responsive as you would like, that very
often crashes exactly during the time frame you needed it most, on top of all the
prep time needed for creating an individual grade for 200 student.
Trimesters enable sufficient updates, and with a
mid-trimester, on top of end of trimester grade, it provides six grading
periods a year. No educator could claim it to be inadequate. And in addition - more
time available for teaching and learning.
So I would say – let’s enjoy the whole summer, and maybe
even the beginning of the fall, to have our mind and body much better prepared
for another school year…
