As summer draws to the end, I’m feeling a little nostalgic for years past, when I would take the kids to Staples for new school notebooks and binders. Being a little OCD, I do enjoy office supplies and containers, but mostly, I was just happy that my kids were going back to school.
Despite the cliched images of summers, most families aren’t sending their kids to expensive camps or hanging out in the summer homes. Rather, summer is a tough time with inadequate childcare and inflexible work schedules.
Truthfully, I am still scarred by my own experiences with two young boys during those fifteen long weeks that schools closed every summer. There was simply not enough camps or programs for the autistic kid, and I had no help.
Back in 2015, I wrote an article for The Atlantic that discussed the notion of year-round school, where the standard 180 days school year is distributed more evenly throughout the year. For example, students might attend school for 45 days, and then get a 15 day break. Proponents say that year-round school reduces learning loss and keep the continuity of education going all year,
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The Forbes article you shared was enlightening, setting out the problems of simplistic repeated reading tests in a non-politicized way. I think there’s a set of people who want a limited test to measure far more than it can, because a measurement seems so much more unbiased than assessing a skill qualitatively. But it really is easy for a test to diverge from the skills we want to measure, and the measurement can lead us in the wrong direction (like trying to teach comprehension when decoding is required or the other way around). Thanks for the link!
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It’s an ongoing problem as to how to meet kids where they are with regard to sex education. In an ideal world there would be enough counselors in every school that kids with concerns beyond the basics could talk to them confidentially. But if all you have are classroom based curriculums you have to decide how much you can deal with before parents get uncomfortable.
My wife has counseled quite a few upset teenage girls who were being pressured to try anal intercourse or other things like choking by their porn watching boyfriends. These girls were lucky; most kids in the schools where my wife worked couldn’t get a slot with a counselor. And certainly these topics were never covered in class. At least at a high level it would be great if someone would tell students that porn is not a great source of sex info. However unless you are allowed to at least name what you are talking about kids aren’t going to listen.
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!!!! I’ve always worried about what wide spread accessibility to porn would do to the already fraught interactions between boys and girls about sex and can see the need for naming when information is available from so many sources and when we do desire religiously driven messaging based on rules and prohibitions. It is eye-opening to hear that indeed, teenage girls are facing these issues in the world (and not as a theoretical concern)
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The book The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan talks about how college students currently see a connection between sexual violence and coercion and porn in a way that was not the case when I was a student in the late eighties.
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Your discussion of year around school and how you would have desired it (when it is a non norm in the US). I think I wouldn’t have wanted year round school (though I do remember being a bit shocked when I realized the work required to find programming in the summer when my eldest left her preschool/daycare for kindergarten). But, if the norm had been different? or if her school had just offered summer programming? I think I might have just chosen that care.
Having schools offer that as an add on (even if paid by the family, potentially with income based payments — as my town has for full day kindergarten) seems like a plausible experiment. That method, though, would mean extra cost; if done as an add on, not staffed by teachers, maybe at lower cost, but it would be a significant cost. If staffed by teachers, one should expect 25% extra, for adding a quarter more school. And, I think that cost is what makes year around school a nonstarter, as much as attachment to different summers, especially through elementary.
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