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Obama to cut summer vacation and lengthen school day

If I was forced into this I would beg my Mom to hire me a personal tutor, I would literally grovel on my knees (I live in Canada, so it probably won't come to this for a while, but if the Americans do change, I can expect Harper will follow suit). My problem with this is the workplace would end up driving me mad. Students would hate having to stay longer, which would lead to more grumbling and misbehaving, which leads to the teachers getting grumpy, which results in more detentions, suspensions, and expulsions for less critical violations, which makes the students even grumpier, which leads into an ever-lasting cycle that'll probably send us all into a living Hell 24/7. In my opinion, bad idea. Not that I should be questioning the intentions of Obama, who is an experienced political figure-head with much better ideas than a whining schoolboy like myself, but it's just wrong.

Please don't judge me on this D:
 
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anyway, no to this proposition. I spend enough time at school already with three-hour marching band rehearsals.

Ah, yes, but if school is longer, then you'll have three-hour long marching band class, hence shorter (if any) rehearsals!

And because I'm in High School now, I'm allowed to argue with this:

eliminate the state-regulated tests.

They do not affect your grades. Preparing for the test takes up time which could be spent, uh, you know, learning actual math/ELA. Instead, you get bombarded with pointlessly retaking old tests and doing example questions.

If instead, there was a test at the end of the year (say, early June) that recapped what you learned, you'd have spent much less time on test prep, and could actually focus on learning.

I'm all for school beginning later, so long as you get more days off.

--Make the school day begin later
--Eliminate standardized tests
--Get more days off

Getting rid of standardized testing would be all good and dandy on the first look. However, it'll pose some problems...

One, by getting rid of standardized test scores, colleges and universities will have no standardized basis to compare applying students. Yes, there are other things they can be based on, like GPAs and extracurricular activities. However, there are several flaws in basing college admission on those alone. GPAs vary widely across schools -- different schools have different standards, and the grades vary with teachers as well. It'll be quite unfair to a smart student who got a B in a very tough school when he/she would have easily gotten an A in another school. Extracurricular activities vary with geography. A student interested in, say, environmental sciences may live in the middle of a huge city, making finding activities related to his or her interest hard. Even if said student manages to find an activity, he or she may not be able to go because of transportation problems and such. Standardized testing gives colleges and universities something they can compare students with.

Also, standardized testing forces students to study. Even if they're not graded, students still must study and learn whatever they're getting tested on in order to get a good score. Even if the information will be forgotten very soon later, that argument could be applied to everything else (ex. you'll forget how to play piano if you don't play it for 5 years).

I am aware that the current standardized tests are... let's just put it mildly and say "fail horribly." The SAT, for example, has been shown to only test how well the student takes tests, not how much the student knows or can learn. It's also super long, not beneficial to poor students who can't pay the test fees, and etc. However, if a good standardized test can be made that actually tests the student's ability to reason and learn as well as the student's knowledge, it would be quite beneficial and useful.

I must say that the current standardized tests are flawed in more ways than I can count. However, if these problems are fixed, standardized testing can actually be beneficial.

tl;dr: Standardized testing is fail because it's not testing the right things. However, if it is, then it's good stuff.

I have no idea why I just wrote several huge paragraphs on standardized testing instead of doing homework.
 
Eh, public schooling in America (and pretty much elsewhere in the world) is bullshit anyways. The entire point is to churn out clones who can do whatever the country wants. I guess Obama either:
A. Sees this and is trying to take advantage of it
or
B. Is stupid and doesn't know any better.

Anyways, it's not really going to affect me (yay Sudbury)
 
I don't see the problem. I've started at 9:00 and ended at 3:15 for years, and now sometimes I start at 9:00 and finish at 4:15... a longer day isn't so bad. I know people who go on for much longer.

Year-round school would people be at least a little annoying.
 
Im sorry to say but I don't support longer days 'casue I have to get up at 6:15 every morning and get out at 4:15 + i love my summer break (camp!)
 
I think it's mental that a lot of American schools start at 8 or before anyway... 9 - 3:00/3:30 has always worked fine for me

And shortening summer break can't be that bad I mean don't you guys get over 2 months? over here we get 6 weeks. Seven if we're lucky :|
 
Late june - early september. Schools that start in august are weird.

Also: glorious Schadenfreude!
 
I don't see the problem. I've started at 9:00 and ended at 3:15 for years, and now sometimes I start at 9:00 and finish at 4:15... a longer day isn't so bad. I know people who go on for much longer.

Year-round school would people be at least a little annoying.
Year round school WOULD be better.

I'm assuming you're not in the U.S. but anyways where I live at, we start school at 8:00 and don't get out until 3:30. It's already hard enough getting out of bed so early in the morning but if we got home later, that would cut into our plans.
 
Over here, first period starts at 7:45, but I have to be at the bus stop at like 6:45. Last period ends at 3:09. A 9:00 to ~3:00 school day sounds amazing. ; ;

My summer break is from early June to late August; I get about a week and a half off from before Christmas to after New Year's, and then a week-long spring break. And then a lot of 3-day weekends and half-days so the teachers can have meetings or something. Although from what I hear, those "teacher meeting" days are really "the teachers post our grades on Edline and then pretend to work for the rest of the day" days.
 
tl;dr: Standardized testing is fail because it's not testing the right things. However, if it is, then it's good stuff.

I have no idea why I just wrote several huge paragraphs on standardized testing instead of doing homework.

No, I'm saying that the tests should be emphasized much less.
 
I don't see the problem. I've started at 9:00 and ended at 3:15 for years, and now sometimes I start at 9:00 and finish at 4:15... a longer day isn't so bad. I know people who go on for much longer.

See, Harlequin, here's the thing. In my school district, we already have some people who start school at 8:30 and end at 3:30. They're elementary schoolers.
Since I'm in high school, I start class at 7:30 and get out at 2:20. In middle school, I believe that you started at 8:00 and got out at 2:45.

My issue is this: We get up too early. I think that if we just made the elementary schoolers go to school first (since kids are more prone to morning-oriented schedules, that is, waking up at six), and let high schoolers spend a later part of the day in school, then we could get more done.

In any case, I'm for all-year schooling in theory (though not in practice, since I've grown far too attached to my summer breaks), and ambivalent about longer school days, since I feel already that it just starts too early, and extracurricular activities (in which you are practically obliged to participate if you want to have a good resume so that you can get into a good college) make long days longer, but I would like to have more time to learn in my classes (since I like learning, which we sometimes don't get around to).
...Though if we were to make longer school days, I should hope that we'd do away with some homework, since we'd have less time to work at home. (That, and teachers'd have less time in which to grade.)
...I feel like that didn't make much sense...
 
High schoolers get up early so they can be at their crappy fast-food jobs by the time the elementary schoolers get out of school. Longer school days won't change that.
 
High schoolers get up early so they can be at their crappy fast-food jobs by the time the elementary schoolers get out of school. Longer school days won't change that.

Where I live, elementary school students get out over an hour earlier than high school students. Two hours for one of the high schools.
 
Urf, I'm all for later-starting days. I don't care how it cuts into summer or if I have to stay later. Just let me sleeeeep... I think a lot of students feel the same way. I'm too tired to actually think of a good, justified reason at the moment.
 
Hm, really... Oh well, I must say that I don't have much knowledge in that area, so I could be wrong.

But then again, you'll never know until it actually happens.

My band directors are assholes. And when it comes to marching, I'm sure that applies to 99% of directors elsewhere, if they care about doing well in contest.

e.g. Every monday night, 3 hour rehearsal. 1.5 hour rehearsal every day during school. Mandatory 1.5 hour rehearsal after school once per week (by section). On game days, we go straight to rehearsal when school is out, until like an hour before the game which is when we eat.

BAND SUCKS AAAIHWEOIWGBFU
 
My band directors are assholes. And when it comes to marching, I'm sure that applies to 99% of directors elsewhere, if they care about doing well in contest.

e.g. Every monday night, 3 hour rehearsal. 1.5 hour rehearsal every day during school. Mandatory 1.5 hour rehearsal after school once per week (by section). On game days, we go straight to rehearsal when school is out, until like an hour before the game which is when we eat.

BAND SUCKS AAAIHWEOIWGBFU

My schedule is a three-hour rehearsal on Tuesday from 5-8, a three-hour rehearsal on Thursday from 5-8, football games on Friday, a four-hour rehearsal on Saturday from 8-12 (only every other week though, and the rehearsal's only around two hours on competition days).

A two-hour-longer school day would get out at 4:15, so I'd actually spend more time at school waiting around for 45 minutes for practice. It takes the bus like half an hour to get me home, so if I tried to go home that way I'd have to leave immediately and still be considered late. :/
 
I had a great lengthy post, but then my computer ate it. >=( Anyways, here are my views in a nutshell.

- Improve the teachers and classes of the schools that need work on them
- Start later, end later. Wake up later, and we'll be awake for classes. I, for one, have a terrible habit of falling asleep in class because I'm always incredibly tired.
- DO NOT LENGTHEN THE SCHOOL DAY. Many kids, such as me, have many activities they do after school; for me it ranges from Guitar lessons to local theater productions. These things that we have after school are often things we enjoy doing in our spare time. Extend the school day, we'll most likely lose some of those things, and about every kid in America will hate the government.
- Don't kill summer. Well, I would be fine with killing a couple weeks of it, maybe, but not much. There are a ton of other things we do in the summer. I had an opportunity to do this really neat thing with a few friends of mine, where we go to a community with other groups from across the country, and we do community service stuff there. It was an absolutely amazing experience. We do things like this, or other fun things in the summer. Yes, summer gets a little boring towards the end, but there's the time in between that when we actually enjoy summer.

I don't think this will progress much further, but if it does, then I swear that someone's going to have very bad things happen to them.
 
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