Posted on 09/20/2018 8:56:22 AM PDT by re_tail20
The world does not revolve around you, teens are often told. Indeed it doesnt, as they are reminded every school-day morning when disabling their alarms. The average start time for public high schools, 7:59, requires teens to get up earlier than is ideal for their biological clocks, meaning many teens disrupt their natural sleep patterns every school day.
The world, apparently, does not revolve around parents either. Their lives also tend to be mismatched with school-day schedules, which usually end a good two hours before the typical American workday does. As Kara Voght recently wrote in The Atlantic, that leaves a daily gap of unsupervised time for many children, forcing their parents to find affordable care for their kid or to adjust their own working schedule.
Why does the school day end two hours before the workday?
Its not entirely clear who the school day does revolve around. The schedules that dictate most of American K-12 life descend from times when fewer households had two working parents. The result is a school day that frazzles just about everybody. But a few changes could mitigate that frazzling significantly. I dont know about making everyone perfectly happy, says Catherine Brown, the vice president of education policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. But I think that we could get much closer to optimizing for students, parents, teachers. The school day, Brown says, could be improved in two main ways: It could start later, and it could go longer.
A later start, in both middle and high school, would help with the later sleep cycles that are typical in teenage years. Most teens dont naturally fall asleep until about 11 p.m., and are supposed to get about nine hours of sleep per night. But when class starts before 8:30as....
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
In many schools, opening revolves around the parents who have to be at work by eight. For instance, the doors open here at 7:15, and there is a large group waiting to get in, plus a long drop off line. That gives the parents time to get to work by eight. The end of the day, though, doesn’t match anyone’s schedules since the kids get out just before three, while the parents don’t get back in town until six-ish. If anything, dismissal revolves around the teachers who have put in eight of more hours already.
Maybe if we adjust ‘daylight time’ 3 hours for everyone we can accomplish the same end...
Farm chores or how about a job so they’ll have a little experience when they turn 18.
If you’d ever been on a farm, you’d know farm chores begin before the break of day. The animals need breakfast just like you. They need milked and their stalls cleaned out and they need to be turned out. If you wait until 2:30, you’ll have sick animals and expensive vet bills.
That’s aok with me. I think school should be a full day, that’s all, with time built in to do homework. From the 9th grade onward, tt should mirror a full-time job as much as it could.
I am an attorney at a major law firm in NYC. The firm “opens for business” at 9:30am and “closes for business” at around 5:30pm. That’s the “workday” but many people come in earlier as needed and almost everybody stays significantly later, as needed.
It’s appalling how that hideous school abused and oppressed those poor children of color.
I know people who drop their little kids off at day care at 6 am and don’t pick them up until after 6 pm. Sure, lets have schools with long hours to make it easy on parents who have to fight 5 o’clock traffic coming and going. That’s illogical.
Every kid in that photo is white.
The school board at that time worried about children growing up in an urban environment losing touch with nature and how to fend for themselves. So school gardens were established. Some lasted into the 1930’s.
A lot of the produce was used for school lunches. Some was sold, and the rest given to soup kitchens.
Not really a typical workday, either. I never worked such a schedule in my life. None of my family or friends do/did, either, that I know about.....except for my cousin the lawyer, but we don't like to talk about her. She attended Harvard Law School, after all.
One of my nephews currently works 7am - 3:30pm, for example.
Public schools are nothing but preparation to be a good, loyal tax payer. Kill the soul early and prepare the kids for being chained to a desk and being told when they’re allowed to enjoy themselves, no more than 3 weeks a year as an adult of course.
Any free time (weekends) will be spent doing chores you were unable to do during the work week and watching mindless crap on a glowing screen because you’re to exhausted to do anything else. After you are no longer useful, you can spend those last few moments of life wishing you did something besides working 10 hours a day for your entire life when you were healthy.
Unfortunately, this is how the majority will spend their lives.
Oh, my! Child slavery! Would that be cotton?
Now that’s a garden !!
The whole article grated on me, but the statement that we are asking parents to subsidize the school day because they need to find childcare for after school was especially irritating.
Children belong to the parents, it is not the taxpayers responsibility to provide care during working hours.
Even before we homeschooled our kids I was there to take them to school and there to pick them up. They were my children, not wards of the state.
It sounds like it’s all part of the child-centered crap that has turned out the snowflakes we are now experiencing. Rather than grow these kids up, it’s all about entertaining them and making them feel good about themselves (which can only happen when they are growing up properly).
NONSENSE!!!
Only poor, abused, oppressed CHILDREN OF COLOR were ever forced to work in the fields!!!!!!!
Check your privilege!!!! You're being subconsciously RACIST!!!
That's really funny. At the local public high school where I live, classes run from 7:35 am to 2:09 pm., with nine periods of 41 minutes each. But the teacher is obligated to work only five teaching periods and one non-teaching period. That adds up to to about 4 hours of actual work a day. Throw in another two periods to grade papers, and perhaps the taxpayers can get six to seven hours a day out of our "overworked" teachers. What a joke.
They’re being OPPRESSED! See the violence inherent in the system?!?!
School could formally start at 9:AM and end at 5:PM with optional “home room” classes from 8:AM to 9:AM and 5:PM to 6:PM, for doing homework and to match kids drop off and pick up times for when possible by parents, as needed. A kid who lives close enough to walk or ride a bike to school could skip the opptional home room classes. Teachers could rotate tbe responsibilities for the home room classses.
BOOM! - MIC DROP
Also best to begin picking produce when the first bit of sun comes up. You want do be done with the task before noon-time sun is high.
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