Perdiendo el hilo de la educación: Educación durante el año entero
By: Keith
Una gran ventaja que los niños educados en el hogar tienen sobre los niños que atienden a la escuela pública es la falta relativa de tiempo de vacaciones. Nosotros no paramos nuestras clases durante el verano o durante las vacaciones de Semana Santa o en la mayoría de los días festivos. El resultado es que no nos retrasamos en nuestro aprendizaje y no perdemos tiempo tratando de regresar a donde lo dejamos. He leído que las escuelas públicas utilizan hasta 1/3 parte del año escolar revisando el material que cubrieron antes de las vacaciones de verano porque, con tanto tiempo libre, los niños olvidan lo que aprendieron. Las vacaciones de verano, son entonces, una gran pérdida de tiempo y es un detrimento para progresar. Bueno, una vez dicho eso, yo me he caído del vagón durante esta Navidad. Terminamos tomando el mismo tiempo de vacaciones de invierno que los demás niños. Lo que significa no escuela por dos semanas. Me encuentro ahora en un territorio no familiar. Nunca he tenido que recomenzar a enseñar después de tomar un largo período de descanso, pero no era realista el continuar con las lecciones normales esta Navidad con todas las actividades de las festividades sucediendo a nuestro alrededor. Las vacaciones de Invierno son mucho menores comparadas con lo que los maestros deben pasar cada año cuando las clases comienzan después de las vacaciones del verano.
Algunos padres si entienden:
Algunos padres han comprendido qué tanto pierden los niños durante las vacaciones de verano. Ellos mantienen a sus hijos activos durante el verano con educación para suplementar. Lo que hace que la caída después del verano sea mínima una vez que las clases comiencen. ¿Pero qué tal con los padres que no lo entienden? Los maestros tienen que trabajar con una gran discrepancia en las habilidades de sus estudiantes porque algunos niños mantienen la información que aprendieron durante las vacaciones y otros no. ¿Cómo pueden los maestros continuar enseñando cosas nuevas, mientras que al mismo tiempo, tienen que continuar regresando a revisar el material viejo para beneficio de aquellos estudiantes que no practicaron lo que aprendieron durante las vacaciones? Después de todo, los maestros solamente pueden enseñar al paso del estudiante más lento, ¿cierto? ¿Acaso no los estudiantes quienes sus padres mantuvieron estudiando durante el verano sufren a beneficio de aquellos que no estudiaron? Esa 1/3 parte del tiempo perdido es una estadística que se mantendrá válida, no importa que tan duro hayan trabajado los niños diligentes.
De vuelta a mi caso:
Ayer yo puse a mi hijo de 5 años a contar dinero para mí. Esto fue lo último que aprendimos antes de nuestra pausa de dos semanas. Predicativamente el perdió su mente y olvidó cómo hacerlo. No estoy preocupado. El regresar a nuestra rutina no debería ser tan difícil. Solamente son dos niños y son mis hijos. No es como si yo fuera un maestro con 30 niños extraños corriendo como locos quienes tienen diferentes habilidades y necesidades. Mi trabajo como un educador es pan comido comparado con lo que los maestros de escuelas públicas tienen que trabajar una vez que regresan de cada periodo de vacaciones. No es de sorprender que se pierda tanto tiempo en las escuelas públicas. Es una pesadilla burocrática. Los niños no pueden ser dados de baja por no desempeñar su función. Ellos solamente pueden ser acomodados de manera diferente. El tener que estar al corriente con todo esto es una gran pérdida de tiempo.
Escuela durante todo el año:
Por las razones que mencioné arriba, yo creo que las escuelas deberían implementar un sistema educativo que dure todo el año. Educación durante todo el año era una idea que andaba circulando cuando yo era niño. Nunca fue implementada porque la unión de maestros hizo un gran escándalo sobre eta (si recuerdo bien). A mí me parece que la escuela durante todo el año sería bueno para los maestros, no malo. Definitivamente sería bueno para los niños. Los niños todavía podrían tomar una serie de vacaciones durante el año. Tal vez una semana después de cada 6. Ellos tendrían el mismo tiempo libre, pero no todo a la vez. Yo no sé porque las escuelas no lo hacen. Yo lo puedo ver solo en estas dos semanas vacías en que mis hijos han olvidado lo que aprendieron. Eso me puso a pensar qué tanto olvidan los niños durante el transcurso del verano. El desperdicio en nuestras escuelas públicas es increíble. Seríamos mucho más eficientes si tuviéramos escuela durante todo el año, e implementándolo sería tan sencillo como reimprimiendo los calendarios.
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We don’t have a “year round” school schedule out here, but have only 6.5 weeks of Summer Vacation. There is always a summer homework packet sent out by the teachers. You are correct sir..the kids do tend to forget what they learned over the summer.
.-= Denise´s last blog ..I Forgot….(See Below Entry ..Sorry!) =-.
Our local school district is pretty phenomenal and operates on a “modified year round” schedule. 2-3 weeks off every 9 weeks or so. I think it’s a great idea…for all of the reasons that you stated.
.-= Stephanie´s last blog ..A Mom 2.0 Story {why I’m opting out this year} =-.
Your assessment of what is going on in the public schools and what teachers do and do not do about it is oversimplified. I’m not saying it is inaccurate necessarily, though, I think you are not really clear about the requirements and demands of the public school teacher. Merely adding time to the school day or year (and how will this be funded, I’d like to know…in many places they are going to a four day week due to funding) is not going to solve the problems you identify and it will create others.
As a public school teacher and a single parent of four children and sole provider (which means I don’t have the luxury of home schooling my children), I can tell you this…I’ve worked in large school districts with year around school and I hated it. Summer isn’t vacation for the teacher…it’s recovery.
.-= thewildmind´s last blog ..Sex or Making Love? Who Is Confused? =-.
Thewildmind, It’s offensive to me that you seem to believe that you are the only person who understands hard work. Are you suggesting that teachers deserve a whole summer of vacation while other professions do not for the reason that public school teacher work harder than everybody else? If that’s what you’re saying then I’m afraid we don’t have much to talk about since you are clearly not thinking straight. What the heck are you talking about with the funding? I don’t want any time added to the school day (I never said that — you didn’t listen). As a matter of fact, I would be in favor of shortening the day. I also never suggested adding any time to the school year. I said to spread the vacation out over the course of the year rather than have it clumped all together. Explain how that requires extra funding. Seriously. The problem (one problem, not many) that I identified is that kids are forgetting information over the summer. This is not rocket science. And, no, it is not complicated at all. You may not know this but I used to be a public school teacher myself. I’m sure you think you’re pulling one over on me by saying how hard teachers work. let me tell you. I’ve been a teacher and a martial arts instructor and a statistical analyst. The hardest job, by far, was my statistics job — not teaching. I guess I deserved a summer vacation to “recover”. Please. And, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t suggest what I do is “luxury”. I was being polite when I said how hard teachers have it. They don’t have it easy, but it’s no harder than many professions.
Wow, Keith, cool down!
Sounds like I pushed some buttons here.
Let’s review. I did not ever once say or imply that teachers work harder than everyone else. What I did say is that you oversimplified a very complex issue.
There are many reasons, not just one, why children fall back during summer (or any break) and one solution won’t address every cause. Since there is no way to determine all the variables effectively, it is really a shot in the dark to see if that one solution works for every child and how would you do the research anyway in order to determine your whether or not your intervention (year round school) effectively fixed the problem for your particular students? I’m guessing that the children who have the biggest problems with fallback are also the ones dealing with far more serious issues that year round school in and of itself will not even come close to addressing. And that’s assuming that the people looking at the data and making decisions about funding, teachers, whether or not progress for each individual child is being made as it should, even care about the fallback. The problem is they don’t. The reality is there are very effective ways to deal with it that don’t include going to year round school.
I might add that if you’ve been away from teaching for a while, even six years, you are probably not really familiar with the changes that have been federally and locally mandated for teachers. Nor are you aware, maybe, how incredibly scientific everything has become. We don’t just pick up and teach something now because it seems a good thing to do. We don’t get to plan our own schedules. We are more and more very strictly regulated by outside forces. Not a bad thing, necessarily, but not your mother’s school experience or even yours or mine. Some (not all) of this change has resulted in increased demands and workloads with a reduction (not a maintenance) of time given to plan or prepare. I don’t know about you, but I do need some time to prepare materials, organize resources and think about the best strategies to use in order to differentiate my learing for all 32 of my students (some of my colleagues are pushing 40 students in their rooms at elementary grades). If I just wanted to go in and “deliver” lessons that’s one thing, but I am held to the standard that my children perform at a certain level. That’s a very different thing. You can’t do that every day on the fly.
Further, you tell me what other professional position out there is required to have a graduate degree, gets 1 ten minute break a day to go to the bathroom, 1 thirty minute lunch that MUST be used for preparation, and is required to continue their training and education on their own nickel while getting significantly less compensation than other professions that require the same things and still spends a good deal of their discretionary income on materials for their classroom. I’m not complaining about it, I chose it, but when you deal with other professionals and their perks and ours you are comparing apples to zucchini. Many professional occupations out there will end up getting the same amount of vacation time I get (or nearly so) with nearly double the pay and far better benefits for the amount of time I’ve been teaching. So the comparison thing is really a non-issue, it doesn’t fly and I wasn’t making that statement.
As for the funding, let’s look at this logically, If you take the same amount of instructional time and spread it out throughout the entire year without adding time, you are still going to end up with large chunks of time where students and teachers are not in school and the very problem you seek to solve will not be addressed. Further, this really is a non-issue with the majority of children who with some very good instruction can be moving ahead without taking anywhere near the 1/3 of the school year you discuss. (It would, by the way, be helpful for you to link to that data when you are going to use it. I would have run right to it, since it is nowhere near been my experience over the last two decades.)
Oh, and by the way, the use of the word, “recovery” was a joke. Humor, dear boy. If I was implying anything, teaching children is an emotionally demanding job. There are heartbreaks every day that stats analysts are not going to ever deal with. (Ever had one of your reports walk out the door on Friday only to read that she died in an auto accident on Sunday? Ever had your statistical analysis tell you it is hungry and the only food they get is the school lunch?) That doesn’t mean the analyst’s job is less difficult or stressful, but it is a very different kind of difficult and stress. I’ll say it again. I never once made the comparison, I only talked about teachers and I only spoke from my perspective and shared my preferences. I thought that was the implicit invitation I had when asked to offer a comment. I neither meant to impune the very hard work other professionals do nor exalt the harder work my profession does. Although, how many statistical analysts get bashed routinely and publically for not doing their jobs when in fact they are sacrificing a great deal personally to do the job? It happens weekly to the teaching profession.
I am also not saying that year round school doesn’t work very well in some places. It does, I’ve heard. It has not been my experience and I would not like it if my school district were to consider it. Again, I was neither intending to offend and I did not compare. I simply shared my thoughts based on my experience. Where you took that is where you took that.
As for getting to stay home and home school my kids, it would be a luxury since it would mean that somehow my financial concerns were being taken care of by some other method than me having to work 12 hours a day outside my home to pay the bills and feed my children. That, would be quite luxurious a venture I think. It should in no way be offensive to you. My feelings and my opinions are mine and they have absolutely nothing to do with you. It wasn’t an insult.
.-= thewildmind´s last blog ..Sex or Making Love? Who Is Confused? =-.
I don’t have the patience to go point by point here. I’ll just say that I’m not trying to fix every problem for every child (that’s a doctoral thesis not a blog post). I’m trying to point out a major, and obvious, flaw in our educational system. Kids lose information over extended periods. That much we know. So the obvious solution is to shorten the down time, not eliminate it. Spreading the vacation time throughout the year would absolutely take care of the major issue of forgotten information. My kids lost a little bit over Christmas, but not nearly as much as they would have if we had taken an entire summer off. The loss of information is not cumulative. The longer a child is away from school the more compounded the loss becomes. So, clearly, if vacation time is spread out rather than clumped, then that compounded loss never happens, only small revocable losses occur.
“My Dear Boy.” Seriously? OK.
Staying at home with my kids is not all I do to make money. I make all the money in this family. I’m not going to go into detail of how I do it, but like you, I make the money in this household and teach and care for my kids. If you aren’t comparing then why are there so many comparisons in your argument?
I’ve never had a dead report on my hands, but I have had dead friends and acquaintance. That’s called living life. Everybody has loss, so I don’t really see anything special about that.
I think anybody who reads your previous statements will conclude as I did that you were comparing the life of a teacher with other professions and that you were indeed implying that you have more authority to say I’m inaccurate because of your life experience. I’m simply saying that your life experience does not make you more qualified to opine than mine. What I have stated is an opinion based on observation. It’s an opinion that a lot of people agree with (including the president). You may not agree, and I respect that. I don’t, however, respect opinions that attempt authority through sophistry.
I simply offered a dissenting view and I’ve been villified for it as well as being accused of saying things I did not say.
I suggested you have not addressed a major flaw in our educational system nor have you come up with a viable solution that works across the board for every student in every school district across the land. It’s my opinion based on my good experience working with at risk kids for the last almost 20 years in both traditional school schedules and year around schedules. By offering it, I do nothing to imply your opinion is not valid, I merely offer a different perspective. I wasn’t hostile, nor was I disrespectful. I was simply straightforward.
Apparently, a dissenting view, however it is expressed is not accepted here. I’m sorry I was under the impression you’d actually appreciate hearing another perspective from someone who is actually in the trenches. My mistake. No need to respond. I won’t be back anytime soon.
.-= thewildmind´s last blog ..Sex or Making Love? Who Is Confused? =-.
Obviously I am not offended by dissenting opinions. I appreciate them. Perhaps it is the medium we’re using to communicate. Sometime the written word is fickle; it can appear to be something that was not intended. I accept that you did not intend to offend. However, if you re-read how you presented your opinion you could see it how I saw it. I’m not an overly sensitive person who can’t listen to differing opinions. I’m trying to look at this objectively. Your last sentence here is purely rhetorical. If I say you’re wrong about dissent being accepted then I’m a Nazi. If I say you’re right, that dissent is accepted, then I’m somehow admitting that I haven’t accepted it in my previous comments — which is untrue.
You’ll notice that my thesis here is that year round school is beneficial for the fact that kids lose information over the summer. I am not talking about special needs kids (even though I still don’t see a difference) or unusual cases that require additional solutions. I’m thinking in very broad terms. Just because it won’t work for everybody doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work for most people. This is a macro argument not a case by case thing. For instance, I can say truthfully that in order to lose weight people must exercise and eat right. Well, some people can’t exercise because of physical limitations. Other people don’t have access to proper nutrition through no fault of their own. That doesn’t make the blanket statement about losing weight any less true.
It helps to have a teacher like Keith that is ultra well-educated, really cares for his kids, and schools them 6 days a week. How else is a kind going to get that level of attention? It’s just not fair.
.-= Dennis Yu´s last blog ..I play video games for a living now– sorta =-.
Over here, some schools have changed the way the year works to five six-week terms with a one or two week break between each. The problem is that some schools have done it and some haven’t, which makes it a bit of a nightmare for working parents.
I help out at school as well as having kids of my own and I really enjoy the long summer break, just to have a rest from the crushing pressures of ‘the routine’…homework, lunchboxes, after school clubs. I think it does them good to have a rest from the drudgery of it all, although I think six weeks really is a little too long because they do start to get bored.
As parents, it is up to us to continue teaching and reinforcing our kids’ education during that time. Not necessarily sitting down with schoolbooks every day, but for them to see is reading and writing. As you said, learning to count money, playing games involving money. These all help with maths. Games and quizes. Maybe watch a foreign film with subtitles. Going out for a walk in the woods or fields and trying to spot wildlife. It doesnt have to be a rigid structure, just little things here and there to revise and revisit.
To me, that’s all part of being a parent and not using the tv or video game console as a permanent babysitter. And, yes, I know how hard it is dragging them away from those two things but if you make the effort even a couple of times a week, you’re achieving something… even if it’s only spending time with them where you’re solely focussed upon them and not thinking about something else.
.-= Joanna Cake´s last blog ..HNT: 2009 Favourite =-.
Joanna, Good point. I agree with your educational philosophy. Kids learn when they are engaged in any activity requiring brain power irrespective of their environment. I think the biggest problem we, in the United States, face is parents who do not engage their kids at home. They leave it up to teachers to do all the educating. Thus, when they have two months of vacation during the summer, they lose too much forward momentum. It’s more of a parenting issue than it is a public school issue. Of course, since so many parents are unwilling to take basic steps to ensure their kids quality education, the next best thing is to prevent the motivated parents and kids from suffering at the hands of the lazy. Year round school forces kids to keep learning when they would otherwise falter. And, I would be someone in favor of a shortened school day too. Being in school for 7 or 8 hours is totally unnecessary. I think a slow burn through the year is much better than going whole hog for 10 months and coming to a complete stop for another 2. Thanks for the comment!