The story of the Greek mathematician Archimedes is one of those classic, basic things you learn in school. In the centuries since the time of the ancient Greeks, knowledge has grown exponentially. Yet the amount of time children spend in school — in many cases re-learning forgotten knowledge — in more recent years has remained relatively constant.
For those of you who didn’t keep your notes, the well-known tale is that Archimedes came up with the principle of displacement as he was taking a bath. Not too many of us think about math when filling up the tub, but what most of us can take from Archimedes’ experience is that if you fill it with too much water, right after settling in you’ll have a wet bathroom floor.
Now, think of that bathtub as your child’s mind. These last several years have seen the greatest-ever amount of growth in knowledge, as well as for the need for children to learn and retain more to fully participate in 21st century life. The increase in mandatory testing in recent years has provided additional challenges to teachers and their pupils.
And now, think of that bathtub as the school day, or the school year. Each day the tub remains the same size, yet we keep pouring more into it. You don’t need to have excelled at math to know what will ultimately happen: More water will be poured into the tub than it can hold.
Archimedes’ bathtub and this modern educational challenge came to mind while reading Friday’s story by the Tribune’s Stacie Spring about a gathering of educators, parents and students at Mesa Community College to watch a 2009 documentary, “Race to Nowhere.” Spring wrote that the film “focuses on how many students are over-tested, over-stressed and willing to do anything to get good grades.”
A discussion followed the screening that included parents complaining about increases in homework, Spring reported.
Of course, reducing the workload is not a particularly smart option. Like it or not, the technology boom that put a world of information into a small handheld device is not going to abate. Our children will need to know more and apply it.
So the water’s going to keep flowing into the tub. The answer, no higher math needed, is to increase the size of that tub. Maybe we can do something to increase students’ capacity to learn. In the meantime we should take steps to properly lengthen the school day and the school year.
Is this unpopular? Sure. Change to longstanding traditions always is. And maybe a third-grader’s school day, or even school year, shouldn’t be as long as a sixth-grader’s, and a sixth-grader’s not as long as an 11th-grader’s. Those kinds of decisions on the details would have to be made. But the overall principle is simply that we can no longer afford to keep an agrarian school calendar based on the need for children to work the harvest that became obsolete 125 years ago.
Do longer school days and school years cost money? Absolutely. Schools that are open longer will have higher operating costs. Teachers’ salaries will need to be increased to compensate them for the additional time and effort. The amount will not be insignificant. But in the long run, America and its economy stand to suffer more significant, even permanent consequences if things don’t change.
As the nation slowly emerges from its recent economic crisis, it’s becoming plain that many high-skills jobs being outsourced abroad are jobs our schools and colleges aren’t training enough American students for, but other nations’ educational institutions are. Already, to increase the amount of mathematics and science training in schools to the degree that it has, other important subjects have had to have their share of time reduced, most notably, civics.
To ignore this situation, which leaves the bathtub the same size while more water gets poured into it, is only going to result in more knowledge spilled over the side and not retained by the next generation, to its detriment and to ours.
We are fortunate in the East Valley to have so many terrific public, private and charter schools. The vast majority of them are doing most everything they can with what they have, with the size bathtub of learning they have to work with.
With a little more than two weeks until the general election, we hear candidates talking far too generally about education. Voters desperately need to hear more specifics about the growing knowledge explosion and what can be done to make sure our young people are in the best possible position to benefit from it.
Unfortunately, nearly all we’re going to get are ads telling us how lousy an individual somebody’s opponent is going to be if elected, while the bathwater keeps flowing out the door.
Read Tribune contributing columnist Mark J. Scarp’s opinions here on Sundays. Reach him at mscarp1@cox.net.
Arizona Willie posted at 9:52 am on Sat, Oct 20, 2012.
Unfortunately, in Arizona, our ultra right wing Legislature HATES public education.
The Legislature cuts education funding year after year and, if given the opportunity, would continue cutting until not a single public school was left open.
The current sales tax proposal that is < supposed > to put more money in education that the Legislature can't cut has many many holes in it.
There is no guarantee the money will get to teachers and the classroom.
There is NOTHING to stop the Legislature from spending the money currently budgeted for education on something else because the voters have given them replacement money.
There is no question that schools should be run year around. Since the advent of central heating and air there is NO reason to have school buildings sitting empty for 1/4 of the year.
But will anything happen to change the situation?
OF COURSE NOT.
It would require so much change in society on so many levels.
Plus it would require paying more TAXES ( death word to politicians ).
But there is no question our schools are extremely inefficient.
Teach kids for a few months then send them home to play for months and forget half of what they learned previously.
Life in America has become very hard for many people.
Mom and Dad both have to work -- often two jobs each, or more.
We still treat our teenagers as though they were in kindergarten and needed to have play time away from school. Months of it.
I think that kids from about 6th grade on should go full time ... year around.
Time to quit babying them.
Americans rank way way down in so many many subjects in relation to other countries in the world.
Why?
Our kids are PART TIME students.
Richardoville posted at 12:23 pm on Sat, Oct 20, 2012.
Agree with Arizona Willie on most everything. Often education involves exposing unknowing minds to things they have never seen and would never have the opportunity to be involved with.
I am glad I was exposed to sports and was told by a Wise Coach that I needed to find something else to be good at! I am glad I was told by a Wise Band Leader that I needed to read the music on the page instead of what I hear so I learned to play several instruments by ear! I am glad I was told by a Wise Auto Shop Instructor that you didn't have to turn wrenches for a living to make a living in the Auto Industry but you need to know the basics and apply them to what you're doing. A career in Parts and Management followed.
I believe that much of what I was exposed to I may have never used and did go down the drain but I'm sure that some of my classmatesand friends took away something they would use in their life path as they went on to be Doctors, Lawyers, Pilots and Millionaire Businessmen - and those are the ones I know about. We'll not dwell on the two brothers in Prison. Exposure to the arts, sports and other electives is not a waste of time and money as many in the legislature would have you believe.
Knowledge is power and a powerful, knowledgeable electorate is a threat to any elected officlal at the extreme ends of conservative and liberal politics (which is all we're offered up lately) as theirs is usually a belief system based on smoke & mirrors, deceit, lies and self interests that they hope the rest of us know nothing about.
Politicians are counting on the electorate not to have or take the time to understand anything. Read all you can, learn all you can to make an informed decision and demand that you be able to understand what you're voting on and who it benefits!
mesateacher posted at 4:47 pm on Sat, Oct 20, 2012.
Be careful what you ask for. A longer day, a longer school year all sound so very good - but it won't work. As it is now, students today don't have the ability to focus in for a 6 hour day, much less 8. Ask any teacher how difficult it is to teach in May. How hard would it be to keep the little cherubs in line for another month or two? And everyone except a few brave commentators seems to ignore the simple fact that since half of your kids are below average, trying to force them to learn more that they simply cannot learn will frustrate everyone involved. Teachers will burnout in higher numbers, students will drop out at a higher rate...the law of unintended consequences can bite hard. What we have got to do is 1) admit that not everyone is cut out for academics or college, 2) many people want and are well suited to a vocational career (and there's NOTHING wrong with that!). We need to completely rethink our schools and model them after the German/Japan versions and put kids in tracks they are capable of being successful in. We have been trying to reform schools forever, and it always fails because we keep hanging on the belief that all students are created equal, and that we must have the same outcomes for all. That's wrong, it violated common sense, and is completely out of touch with the reality that IQ matters. Maybe lengthening the school year is ok - but only if we do it in a meaningful way.
JMJ posted at 1:33 am on Sun, Oct 21, 2012.
Interesting discussion of displacement. Archimedes figured it out, all right. But, you are assuming [I assume] that there is enough bathwater, so to speak, to overflow. Seriously, there is not. The way the curriculum has been dumbed down, trust me, there is actually less that is being taught [unfortunately] because it's all targeted to "the test". Having had a few decades to actually be involved in education instead of just speculating about it, I can vouch that 'we', at the direction of all the "gurus" at the top, who don't really know what they are doing, are teaching less. AIMS has been dumbed down.
With Core Curriculum coming in [oooh, what a NOVEL idea...], at least there is an alignment of what concepts are important at what grade level, so that students who move from one common core state to another will theoretically have similar curricula to draw upon, and not be completely lost in space. [Danger, danger, Will Robinson!]
The curricular gurus have decided to lock in those lyrics and have everyone preactically on the same page on the same sentence on the same word on the same syllable in a very prescriptive model of "teaching"--and, the "one size fits all", as stated by another post-er, is unfortunate. One prescription does not fit every illness, so to speak.
I do agree with the German model of education, wherein students are tracked [tracking became a dirty word about ten years ago, in education, by the way...unfortunately...]. Students are not all cut out for Harvard. There are myriad career paths besides what colleges offer. There are other gainful employment opportunities. Plumbers earn more than teachers, and teachers generally have at least two degrees. With my masters degrees and two decades of what ammounted to indentured servitude, pay-wise, in education, my plumber still out-earns me.
The "professional learning community" approach has its drawbacks. There are so many more interruptions to the school day, now, than ever before, with ability grouping [formerly known as "tracking", that dirty, dirty word...] having kids going hither and yon for remediation and enrichment, etc. All kids benefit from enrichment, by the way.
This fractured approach to teaching the basics may show 'gains', toward the test, but not really be an all-encompassing, comprehensive approach to help kids with how they learn, individually, and how much more they'd learn if the focus were not so narrow. Ask teachers what their days are like compared to as little as five years ago. They'll tell you. Look at the bags under their eyes. That'll tell you even more. Ask them if they love teaching as much as they did ten years ago. Oops. That's right. You're not going to find many left to ask that questions, because they are LEAVING as soon as possible with all these silver bullet changes which have them in the gunsites, threatened with losing their jobs if they don't fill the empty tubs they've been given, to keep the metaphor going.
Anyway, don't worry, the tubs just ain't overflowing, and extending the day isn't going to get the tubs to overflow, either.
10,000 hours of practice to "get good" at what interests a student over the longterm, be it science or plumbing or firefighting or controlling traffic and freeways or landscape design or surgery is the bathtub we need to get individual students into so they can become great at what they want to do. No tub will overflow, at that point, because students will be such eager learning-sponges that they will absorb the knowledge which interests them, and not let it overflow.
You don't necessarily want someone doing your heart surgery just because they can pass AIMS. You want that surgeon with 10,000 hours of practice, or that pilot with 10,000 hours of practice. You want kids to love to learn, again, and have the opportunity to be on a path toward gainful employment for all the myriad careers which are needed in society.
The bathtub "brain trust" never overflowed at our house, because my kids loved learning, absorbed it, then flew far away from our state [to put their kids in other school systems] with their careers, to where they are also gainfully employed and earning way more than this parent. The schools WERE so good when they went here. They didn't have common core, and they weren't taught by PLC zombies.
They ran as far from a career in education, as possible. Sad to say, but I high-fived them and said: RUN. FLY. Have a career where you won't have to worry about expenses all the time.
And darned if they didn't do just that. It's awesome for them and their kids, whom they can afford, by the way, on more than a teacher's salary.
Hopefully all of our students will someday find something which sparks their interest and motivates them to work 10,000 hours of practice into their schedules because they LOVE what they are doing.
Teachers, I hope you still love what you are doing. I certainly did for a long, long time. But I haven't heard a lot of that, lately, under the latest PLC regime which is all the rage. Hang in there, teachers. Courage.
downtownresident posted at 9:13 am on Sun, Oct 21, 2012.
If kids can't read, can't add and subtract without using their fingers, can't tell time without a digital watch, how can anyone expect them to grasp fractions and algebra.
The fact is that the money won't do much, unless it is used to teach the basics. Remember the old saying, "if you keep doing what you always did, you'll keep getting what you always got".
I am not a fan of charter schools. I think they are more about profit than education.
Let's put that money to work teaching kids how to read, write and add first!
Engaged Voter posted at 3:53 pm on Tue, Oct 23, 2012.
"In the centuries since the time of the ancient Greeks, knowledge has grown exponentially"
Except for those centuries where Christianity ruled the civilized world with an iron fist...we refer to this time period as "The Dark Ages".
I mention this because we (Arizona taxpayers) were just forced to pay for a Bible class in our public schools. As if there aren't a hundred better ways to spend that money.