<p>They don’t have study hall anymore, and haven’t for years around here.
My high school even had a specially designed lecture hall for study hall. But didn’t have it in junior high.
I also think study hall was mandatory.
Junior year, my daughter’s first period class was canceled, but the library was either closed or being used for a class, so she couldn’t go there. Some classes are zero period, as are some sports practices.</p>
<p>I agree that the pace of college is much more conducive to learning, especially if you live on or near campus.
In high school my daughter had physics 1st period, senior yr. 7:40am. Considering that she had dyscalculia, plus was up until at least 10:30 every night from other obligations, it was brutal. She had to leave the house by 6:30.
In college, she could take an 8am class and not have to get up until 7:30!
She had tutoring, volunteer job, sports practice, chores and homework after school during high school.
Who has time for TV? She socialized during her sports practices & volunteer work.</p>
<p>Daughter who attended private school also had a pretty full day, but had enough time to take two arts electives every term. Usually art+ vocal in the fall and theatre in spring. She also had a volunteer job that kept her pretty busy & quite a bit of homework.
Her school didn’t have AP classes, but they had an honors option to come in on the weekends.</p>
<p>I think it’s great that teachers are trying to get a better handle on what students face. Now they need to get administrators to not only experience a student day, but to get in * front* of the classroom for a few periods.
<:-P </p>
<p>The MS students use lockers. HS students do not. Because of shenanigans (bombings), we had to carry our books around with no bookbags and could not wear coats all day unless the heat was broken. My son can carry around his backpack and wear a coat all day if he’d like to. Dangerous IMHO, also contributes to stealing at the school letting kids carry backpacks around.</p>
<p>My son’s HS is allowing athletes to miss PE once per week so they have more time to do homework, in NJ.</p>
<p>I would be curious, if someone did an experiment, made up a kid who has a 4.0 UW and the maximum weighted GPA, 2350 SAT (just to not do the perfect thing rejection), perfect essays by a professional who made it look like a student, and NO ECs, where would they get in? Anywhere? </p>
<p>Our regular HS day starts at 7:30 and tutorial which is mandatory many days and for band sectionals runs until 3:05pm. Jazz band starts every morning at 6:30 am so the school day runs 8 periods plus lunch in 8.5 hours. That’s a long day.</p>
<p>Ugh, don’t get me started on PE! My son was a varsity distance runner all 12 semesters of high school. He ran six days a week, usually 5 to 10 miles a day. And he still had to take PE! At least a couple of times, the PE teacher would make the cross country athletes run a mile in class for a grade - the same day as a 3.1-mile race! So stupid.</p>
<p>The kids running indoor track at our school have it rough, too. For a couple of months during the winter, the streets are too icy to run on. So some days they run up and down the school hallways! Other days they go up to Bowdoin to run on the college’s indoor track. They leave around dinnertime and don’t get back until after 10 pm. I left it up to my daughter to decide if she wanted to participate this winter. I was secretly relieved she decided against it.</p>
<p>This particularly struck me:
“Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting.”</p>
<p>I lead workshops for teams of 25 - 35 people in a corporate setting. We make a very big point of being creative and dramatic in our storytelling, interspersing being lectured-at by doing small group work and hands-on learning, having manipulatives for people to play with as they listen, having snacks and stretch breaks. And still we can’t get people to focus. We actually have luck when we do ask people to take mini stretch breaks or mini yoga breaks. </p>
<p>New Jersey lumps PE & health together, our state does not, so that is a separate course.
New Jersey schools are also funded at about twice the rate as schools in my state.( Washington)
What’s the average class size in your high schools?
For a classroom not graduating class.</p>
<p>Re:23
One of my nieces had no ECs, ( except church attendance) participated in her schools IB program, got extremely good grades, essays and test scores, but only had two schools to chose from and one was a safety she didn’t really want to attend.
She did graduate summa cum laude however from a good college.</p>
<p>This would be a fascinating experiment, actually @Rhandco.</p>
<p>It’s interesting to me that professionals teaching/training recognize that when adults aren’t engaged the learning isn’t as effective, but we tend to look at adolescents and think they need to “work on” being more engaged themselves. I wonder if it has to do with the same thing as the homework situation where every teacher assigns his/her hour and a half without realizing every other teacher, including the PE teacher half the time, these days, is also assigning their homework for the night. (Not saying all teachers, just it seems a part of the “system” these days.) So, the teacher thinks the kid should be able to sit still for 50 minutes, geez, it’s only 50 minutes! But, in reality, it’s all day long.</p>
<p>Was it like this when we were kids? I know the homework load is higher, for sure. Was the sitting still less then?</p>
<p>The rigor, the austerity, cutthroat competition, the lack of empathy from the teacher, having to carry around 50 ton backpacks, etc. all work to build character. This is what I learned in my years in a competitive and rigorous high school in which 1 in 4 kids get an Ivy acceptance letter. When teachers don’t give a darn about your struggling, you get prepared for the real world. It’s almost like the military, except you don’t have to worry about losing your life - this is the perfect setting for learning to be responsible, REAL men.</p>
<p>Well that’s interesting @Mathematical do they learn to be real women too? ;)</p>
<p>Our HS does have PE with health for one semester every year-my daughter is a varsity athlete but she loves it-they try a new sport every week it’s fun for her she is going to miss it as after this semester that will become a real class.</p>
<p>This school is easy they have a 45 minute lunch what’s the problem? Our HS has a 25 minute lunch and 4 minutes between classes.</p>
<p>I think if the kid cuts back on ECs they should be able to handle a class schedule that is suited to their abilities. If they want to keep the ECs then something has to give-either they get lower grades on take easier classes or figure out how to do everything get enough sleep. </p>
<p>Time management is a valuable life skill-one that like finances is not very well taught if it is at all.</p>
<p>I have to go to seminars to keep my professional license and those days are truly brutal-I don’t know how these kids sit through this day after day-</p>
<p>The problem with teachers is the same problem with policemen, priests, and coaches. You can have a zillion who are great and caring and wonderful, but if you get ONE who is uncaring let alone is actually evil, the rest of them fade into memory. I had two really really bad teachers in HS. One continually harassed girls, and was thrown out for sexually harassing one girl. Sorry, when I said “thrown out” I meant “was allowed to retire with full pension”. He was a transfer from a neighboring HS, where, we found out later, he had knocked up a student but it was “okay because she was 18 when she had the baby”. The second bad teacher regularly told kids they were garbage (he taught AP classes by the way, so…), told them they would not amount to anything, didn’t let kids make up work from when they were out. Probably the main reason my brother didn’t apply to college on time, this guy was verbally abusing him every day.</p>
<p>My son had his one terrible teacher, and like back in the old days, he couldn’t do anything about it. She actually emailed me, when I asked about why a test wasn’t taken per his 504 plan, that it “wouldn’t matter, he would have done poorly even if he had accommodations”. This same lovely lady also laughed off when she messed up an assignment, and the kids wasted two days on it before she found the problem and everyone had to start over. If <em>she</em> made a mistake, it was an oopsie, if a kid made a mistake, he wasn’t cut out for AP. How they allow people like that to work with children is beyond me.</p>
<p>Another thing that bugs me is that they want to ban any parent drop-offs, like if a child forgets their homework or lunch. Do you ban your employees from going out during the day, during lunch or even during breaks? If not, don’t ban me from helping my kid the same way you would let an employee stop home to pick up some papers they accidentally left there. I can understand if parents are coming in every day for the same kid, then you do something for that family. But most of us are doing this a few times per year at most, and you want to completely ban it?</p>
<p>rhandco I think we can all sympathize with you-I agree it only takes one bad apple to poison the well-it’s really a shame since the vast majority of the teachers my children have had are excellent and professional and caring-why they put up with incompetent or worse colleagues is beyond me.</p>
<p>We don’t have any issues with parent dropoffs although by the time my kids were in middle school unless there was some good reason for forgetting something they were out of luck-they learned fast not to forget things-but that depends on each of us my sister seems to always be dropping by the school to drop something off and she is also much nicer than I am! :)</p>
<p>The theoretical student with no ECs would certainly get into Penn State and other big state flagships that go by scores and grades only. They have too many applicants to do much other than go by a formula (for ex - PSU is very straightforward that admittance is 2/3 gpa, 1/3 SATs or ACT.)</p>