In a past life I worked Tuesday-Saturday.
Holy cow is Monday the best day to have off for errands, rec activities etc to avoid crowds.
Four Day School Weeks
- Thread starter CyState85
- Start date
In a past life I worked Tuesday-Saturday.
Holy cow is Monday the best day to have off for errands, rec activities etc to avoid crowds.
The parents would make alternative arrangements for that one day, much like they currently do with regular scheduled half day PD, snow days, etc.
Years ago childcare wasn't so expensive. You could also (probably) find more childcare back then-someone that stayed at home & willing to watch a couple of kids, etc. Families lived closer to each other. Grandparents weren't also working M-F 9-5 and could help out. Just my opinion, but I think those things have also contributed.
I had a colleague who was from Oklahoma and worked at Okie State. When the state of Oklahoma went to four day school a few years ago as a way to save money it caused a large ripple impacting the entire state. He said he had a lot of students, he was an academic advisor, that "had' to have four day class schedules because they had to go home and watch siblings the days they didn't have school. He said it was causing a lot of problems, and parents were scrambling trying to figure out what to do with their kids the days there was no school.
If they are going to give kids longer days with more work compressed in a shorter week I hope they will stop the trend of early due dates for weekend homework. My son and daughter (went to different high schools) both would come home on Fridays with weekend homework - sometimes pretty substantial homework - but the weekend homework was not due when they went back to school on Monday but at midnight Friday night. Kind of a bear, but even worse for kids who have a football game to play or other Friday night activity.
Weird. Nobody saw that coming.
Urbandale has a year long elementary school and families absolutely love it. It's the toughest school in the district to get in to.
My daughter in HS (Johnston) rarely has any 'home'work that she doesn't have time to do in school, definitely nothing over the weekends. Didn't think HW was all that common anymore.
Well my daughter was taking AP classes so that could be part of it, but the son is not and he regularly has homework, more than can be done in most of his classes.
I think not giving kids at least some take home homework is doing them a disservice. You aren't going to get by in college only doing work in class. Kids need to learn how to be responsible and get work done on their own time and also learn how to study.
My son routinely has homework. His school killed study halls 8-10 years ago so he doesn't have any time to make up work in school.
That sounds like a really dumb policy far beyond 'kind of a bear'.
Even if kids don't have after school activities, it's healthy to take a break after a long week.
The only advantage I can think of from it is it give teachers the rest of the weekend to grade the work but in my experience the grade is NEVER posted on Monday. As a matter of fact my son is constantly having work (paper, not electronic) that is listed as overdue in the system when he turned it in on time. The teacher hasn't gotten around to grading it yet and hasn't even logged it as turned in.
Which puts me on another soapbox: Isn't a big part of learning learning from your mistakes? Isn't that kind of hard to do when the only feedback you get from work you turn in or tests you take is a grade in the grade book? What happened to returning work so you know and can learn from what you got wrong?
/rant
My son has instructors that will be 2 weeks behind on grades for everything. So once they fall behind, they don’t know they are off for a couple weeks and then it’s a mess to try to get back on track.
Different topic for a different thread that's probably cave-ey some how and I feel it's important to have certain targets/benchmarks etc. but it brings into question the meaningfulness or purpose of grades in some aspects along with what tools can be used to evaluate understanding and to give meaningful feedback.
If I get 95% on a test, great, but what about the ones I missed? Is there any incentive to care if I was wrong?
I was an idiot (still am in many ways) according to tests but could accell if writing a paper especially if it gave leighway to exploration rather than just checking boxes.
I think that's putting a bit of a sinister angle on it. They have to work. Childcare is rough, especially part time.
You would think but my son (Johnston Grad) has a 3.8 at ISU and I dont think he ever had homework in HS.
My two oldest kids (youngest is still in HS) had higher GPAs at ISU than they did in HS. A chunk of it, I believe, is caring. They knew they were getting into college and that HS was a formality. They took college much more serious than HS. Throw in that both wee 4 sport athletes that also worked during the summer, so there were times that they just took a hit on some schoolwork because by the time they got out of a game or meet, it was 11 when they got home and spending an hour on homework wasn't a care.
A question, did they have any study halls?
Some will be fine, some will struggle.
I can say that I struggled as a freshman engineering student at ISU years ago. High school was way too easy for me so I would get stuff done quickly and regularly use bad study habits like cramming minutes before a test and writing entire term papers the night before due. I didn't learn good study habits and it showed when the stakes were raised in courses like Calculus, Physics and Chemistry at ISU.
It probably is cynical. My childcare cost me about 90k/year when my wife quit her job 20 years ago.
