Classroom time shrinking?

Parents Forum
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<p>Tonight at my daughter’s basketball game I noticed a 2012 grad who is a freshman at Dartmouth. I thought “What is he doing here - shouldn’t he be in school?” When I got home, I looked up the Dartmouth academic calendar - Classes started Sept. 10, and finals ended Nov. 20. Winter term starts Jan 7. What the heck?</p>

<p>I noticed something similar with my alma mater, when one of my daughters was applying. A full week of October term break, a full week off at Thanksgiving, finals the second week in December. For $50,000 to $60,000 a year, I want more instructional time.</p>

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<p>I thought you were writing about classroom time shrinking in lower grades, which it is. Less time to teach kids the basics: reading, writing, arithmetic, so we can fit in more time for all sorts of “specials”. </p>

<p>I don’t have any experience with Dartmouth’s calendar, but I’m quite surprised to see this. My college kids don’t have a full week off for Thanksgiving or October break. More like 2 days and 1, respectively. But they do get out pretty early in May.</p>

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<p>I hear the opposite from so many people, that their school is spending so much time on the 3 R’s due to NCLB that the kids get very little else.</p>

<p>Our school (where I work) has a good amount of specials, but they definitely have less recess, less social studies, and less of what I’d consider “fooling around” than they did when I was growing up, and I know many schools that have far less of those things than our kids do.</p>

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<p>Dartmouth is on the quarter system, which typically has three 10-week quarters in the academic year instead of two 15-week semesters.</p>

<p>However, it looks like the [fall</a> 2012 calendar](<a href=“http://www.dartmouth.edu/~reg/calendar/term/2012-09.html]fall”>Fall 2012 Term Calendar) indicates 9 weeks and 2 days of instruction, with 4 days of the next week used for final exams.</p>

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<p>Dartmouth’s terms are 9-10 weeks. Winter term is traditionally the shortest. This is the first year that fall term has ended before Thanksgiving, owing to the shortening of the ~3.5 week break between summer and fall terms to ~1 week.</p>

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<p>Dartmouth is on the quarter system but it starts the academic year too early. Quarter system schools in California don’t start the fall term until the last week of September (UCs, Stanford), or the first week of October (Caltech). I was on the quarter system before and my fall term usually ended in Dec 10-12. I did not have money to travel during college time and I was bored in December. I would be nice that I can have that kind of long break now.</p>

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<p>I noticed the same thing when looking at LACs with my youngest. Those on semesters do not have 15 weeks of class, like my older kid’s universities do. Some have J-terms, which may or may not entail taking a class, others just have more breaks.</p>

<p>I like the way my S’s school does quarters - start at the beginning of Sept, end 1st qtr before Thanksgiving, then have 3 or 4 weeks of the second quarter before winter break.</p>

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<p>I’ve also noticed that schools that have higher populations of out of state students have longer breaks over Thanksgiving/Christmas. Carleton College, for example, has from Thanksgiving until after New Years off, so no classes in December. It’s been that way there for years and years, back when I looked at attending Carleton.</p>

<p>I’ve noticed too, that major Universities around us tend to start a lot later in the year than the LAC’s.</p>