The Case for Saturday School | Hacker News Reader

The Case for Saturday School

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12 pointstokenadult32 comments

Absolutely not. Highschool was by far the least productive time of my life. I'd have shot a few teachers if I had to put up with them six days a week.

It was during the gaps in high school that I was able to get any serious learning done. I had the equivalent of a B.S. in computer science by the time I got to college. I'm not bragging; I'm condemning a system that makes this sort of thing so unusual, when in fact it wasn't that hard. All it really took was enthusiasm and some time in which the school system left me the hell alone. That last thing was the hardest to get; thank God for study halls and weekends.

Schools turn learning into a horrible grind. When was the last time you enjoyed a book that you were forced to read for an English class, even if you love reading? Or, for my fellow math-enthusiasts: it's fine to learn how to solve a quadratic equation, but do you really learn anything from doing forty identical problems instead of five?

People who care about a subject will be an order of magnitude better at learning it than people who don't care. And the whole school system seems to be based on the assumption that nobody will ever care.

(Oh, and this doesn't just apply to the top 10% of the class. One of the best classes in high school was a vocational thing where we built a house. We were expected to learn how to put up drywall, wire electrical outlets, use power tools without supervision, and so on, without having a teacher riding our asses the whole time. People rose to meet that expectation and enjoyed the class, even the ones who flunked remedial math and carried knives everywhere.)

Do you mean you had the functional/operational equivalent of a B.S of computer science, as in you were as qualified for an entry-level job? Or did you actually study asymptotic running time, complexity theory, graph theory, computing theory, and algorithms in your spare time during high school?

The latter. My understanding of graph and complexity theory was a little weak, but about on par with what the average CS student actually remembers upon graduation. It's not that difficult if you actually care about it. The great tragedy is that most people who study things don't care about them. I see this all the time: in any given subject, the people who think it's interesting are the people who will learn an order of magnitude faster, and actually remember it afterward. The ones who go in with the attitude of just grinding through won't learn nearly as much. This is why I think that the best way to learn any technical subject is to start on a project you think is cool, and learn whatever becomes relevant, with enthusiasm. If you start programming, sooner or later you'll come across this "quicksort" thing and hear that it's usually "O(n lg n)", whatever that means, and the next thing you know you're reading through an algorithms textbook of your own volition. It's freaky, but it works.

You and probably most people around here are the exception, not the rule. Still it will never happen in the u.s.

My problem with this article is that they assume that school is the best place to learn things, and that an extra 7-8 hours of what most kids would term 'drudgery' per week would actually improve learning.

I agree with the statement that everything is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, but the perspiration is only useful if a student wants to perspire.

They should get 37signals in to sort out the schools. I can see the next book.. ReEducate. I got a sneak peek at the contents. Some highlights:

  Teach half, not half-ass
  Underdo other teachers
  Learning is overrated
  Enough with “tests”
  Start a career, not an education
  Let your students outgrow you

That last one isn't a bad idea. Remember that our teachers are people who are formally educated in teaching, not necessarily in the subjects which they're asked to teach.

Especially in the early grades, a teacher has to be a generalist. Students who take an interest in any given subject will undoubtably know more about it then their teachers do. This is absolutely worth encouraging.

It's no wonder that students aren't interested in learning if their desire to learn is suddenly discouraged once they've gotten off the lesson plan.

That last one isn't a bad idea.

I started out with the concept as a joke/parody, but the more I went through the chapter titles, the more apt some of 37signals' ideas related to the education concept. Spooky!

Their ideas are so universal that they work everywhere. A few months ago, some of my Twitter friends and I went through Getting Real as if it were a book about curing constipation. Most of the chapter titles (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php) work as-is:

  Less Mass
  It Shouldn't Be A Chore
  Hold the Mayo
  Rinse and Repeat
  Alone Time
  Meetings Are Toxic
  Seek and Celebrate Small Victories
  A Softer Bullet
  Track Your Logs
  Beware the Bloat Monster
  Go With the Flow

Horrifically, I could go on..

I wish more of my students would get off the lesson plan. It's more work, but damn do they learn fast when they're doing something they find interesting.

What level of student do you teach? I'm curious if they've been conditioned to not get off the lesson plan because they know it's not worth the effort and it won't be on the test anyhow.

I teach introduction to programming for electrical engineering freshmen. There is no test; only weekly assignments, and I make it clear that they can get off the lesson plan and get full credit if they do something interesting. I try to encourage this, and I've never been disappointed by someone who takes me up on this offer.

But, yeah, a lot of what I do is de-conditioning. For one thing, people need to get out of the habit of waiting for all knowledge to be spoon-fed to them, because that's ridiculously inefficient. They need to learn to use the Google instead of sitting there staring off into space whenever they don't know something.

It's hard getting people to take a more active role in their own educations when they've been taught to be so damn passive, but I hear from a lot of graduating seniors that this was a very influential class for them, for precisely this reason.

It's no wonder that students aren't interested in learning if their desire to learn is suddenly discouraged once they've gotten off the lesson plan.

When I was at high school (in the UK), teachers were keen to only cover things that were known to be in the eventual tests. In math, we skipped set theory entirely because it was known to not be in the final exams.

No, heck no. It isn't the number of hours, its the content and the structure of school. Taking away summer then weekends is two too many insults.

There are a lot of legitimate reasons to cut out the summer vacation or at least move to a year round schedule where the breaks are spread out throughout the year. My wife teaches at a school with a large Hispanic population for whom English is a second language. These students will often lose a lot of their progress not only with the typical academics like every student, but their language progression as well. This means that they are further and further behind every year. It's even worse for those students that go visit family in their country of origin over the summer as they speak even less English while gone. While I personally hate standardized testing, this is one of the areas most effected by the language skill loss over the summer. It's difficult to take a test that uses specific academic language when you don't understand what's being asked, even if you understand how to do the work. This is especially true with the math word problems they are presented with.

I absolutely agree that going to a six day school week would be terrible. Given that we are moving steadily towards teaching kids how to take tests they need that time away from school to learn and grow in other ways. Of course that requires a lot of parental involvement and/or turning off the tv and video games. Those are separate issues of course.

I think the added time in school in summer or any year round schedule is counter productive in other ways. Summer jobs (farming in my end of the country), camp, outreach programs by colleges, family vacations, and just being a kid. Setbacks in English are a problem, but having school full time isn't a good solution. Spending the money that would have been spent keeping the school open for all on intensive language programs for those who need it would be a better use of the money. Hire the companies that contract with the military and State Department. Fix the problems of subgroups with solutions for subgroups.

The problem with summer vacation is that it's between 8 and 10 weeks in most places. During that time the kids lose some of what they learned the previous year and then more time is wasted at the beginning of the next school year on review. Certainly there are other things that are beneficial in other ways and for other reasons that are available in the summer. Let's be honest though, how many kids are actually doing those things compared to the number of kids sitting around watching tv, playing video games etc.

Most year round schools in the US simply shift the 8-10 weeks of break into three smaller breaks. This gives the kids and families time to take their vacations, go to camps etc. This is better for the children in many cases as they have less time away from the school in witch to lose those new concepts that they have learned. Additionally many school districts have managed to use year round schedules and track systems to service more children from fewer schools.

Finally, if you look at other industrialized nations that are offering significantly better educations and having better results with their education systems you'll find that they don't have these long summer breaks. We are no longer a farming nation as a whole, and the summer vacation being necessary for everyone to work in the fields is an outdated concept for the vast majority of our citizens. I'm not suggesting a reduction in the total time away from school, though there's an argument for that, simply removing the single large block during the summer.

> During that time the kids lose some of what they learned the previous year

Shouldn't we train teachers and devise lessons that actually give lasting knowledge? To me anything less seems like a waste of everyone's time. Shorter breaks only delay the problem, because eventually the kids are going to graduate, which is the longest break of all.

Loss is typically attributed to not using their newly learned skills. Teachers are constantly being bombarded with new ways to teach things, and new ways to focus on retention and comprehension. Since this has been a problem for decades it's logical to deduce that the teaching methods aren't the problem and the break is.

For adults it might not be that big of a deal to lose the specifics learned in school as hopefully the ability to learn and tools for learning have stuck. When you are trying to immediately build on a specific set of skills it can be a real hindrance to have to reteach things that the student should already know, but has lost because they didn't use it for 10 weeks. This may not even be that big of a problem for older students, but at the grade school level we are wasting the kids time by having to reteach things.

"We are no longer a farming nation as a whole" - That's fine (although farming is a huge export that is not likely to get outsourced like other industry), but we still have a significant number of states that depend on it. That "outdated concept" is not really so outdated.

The smaller breaks are BS. They do not allow for summer sports, actual camps, actual outreach programs by college, or decent paying summer jobs. If you need time for students with special circumstances (english as a second language) then use the summer for them, but not to keep everyone in school. Part of being a kid is learning to think and imagine, and schools are the last place those things are valued. Innovation happens here, and needs to not be stifled by some scheme to keep kids in school all year.

I also agree with prodigal_erik, why do they lose these lessons? If the lessons won't survive the summer, then they are surely not going to survive when they leave school.

Our schools are not the only place where learning happens. Jobs teach, summer camps teach, and sports teach. They all teach lessons that schools can't or won't.

Problem: What we're doing isn't work.

Solution: Do the same, only more!

Why is that always the answer? (Rhetorical question.)

They cite better test scores from countries like China and India and Japan. The impression I get from talking with people who went to school in those countries is that the system made them very qualified to score well on the all-important tests, but that's hardly high praise.

Corporate culture has become a resonator of low-level fearfulness to such an extent that we gladly throw huge numbers of our fellow human beings in jail, just as we abandon our children to penal institutionalization in schools; the constant presentation of prison as our salvation, or school as the essential trainer of children, makes us all prisoners. It corrupts our inner life, it divides us from one another so that relationships lifelong are thin and shallow. School teaches us to divorce one another, to put aside loyalty for advantage, to quell our inner voices, subordinating them to management.

School and prison do the work that Rome's first emperor, Julius Cesear, said was necessary to manage a conquered population. In order to keep the conquered conquered, you have to keep them divided. School classrooms do that job more gently than prison cells, but they do it more effectively.

-- John Gatto (former Public School Teacher)

I thought that was John Gatto halfway through the first sentence -- admittedly a long sentence.

It is a truth generally overlooked that gentle admonition can destroy ambition, enthusiasm, and dreams of a world better than this one more efficiently than whips and iron bars ever did.

> Just as important, although most youngsters are self-motivated when it comes to what Kaiser terms "entertainment media," far fewer will take the initiative to learn more geometry or rules of grammar on their own.

Funny they should bring up grammar. I never paid attention when English classes tried to teach grammar at me. I just absorbed it from books, osmotically. I did this voluntarily, and so did every kid who's ever picked up a Harry Potter book to find out what all the fuss is about. After that, every English class before college was redundant. It's easier when it's fun. Schools are going about this all wrong; if they can make people enjoy reading, half their problems would vanish.

So here's a modest proposal: have reading classes in which people are encouraged to read anything, and given a selection of stuff that a lot of people like. Harry Potter, Twilight (hold your nose; it's popular), Heinlein, steamy romance novels, whatever. And make sure some of it is sexually explicit; not only does sex sell, but it's probably going to be a much more mature treatment of the subject than the kids will hear from their friends. Devote at least an hour each day (preferably more) to reading, and during this time, leave the students alone. Don't assign a schedule, don't test for reading comprehension, don't be a dick; just let them read whatever they want. I predict that this will easily do more to improve language skills than Saturday classes or abolishing summer break.

I searched but couldn't find info on time spent in school across nations that included Finland.

Why Finland? I "heard" somewhere that Finnish students spend less time in school, and/or on homework, than American students.

Why Finland? This chart:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Stu...

2000, Reading Literacy: #1 Finland, #15 United States

2003, Mathematics: #1 Finland, #24 United States

2006, Science: #1 Finland, #21 ah fuckit

This other WSJ article looks at how Finland does education:

http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120425355065601...

There's really too much to quote, but here's something really embarrassing. A Finnish exchange student, who went to school in America for a year, was forced to repeat that year when she got home. Ouch.

More time spent in a failing school system is not going to fix the school system. Something from what Finland and other countries are doing, regardless of hours, is probably closer to what we need.

The fallacy is considering "academic performance" to be meaningful.

Do people really think that the model of "Schools as factories" will work? The next step will be to increase the number of hours per day, after Saturday school fails to give the anticipated results.

They're already increasing the hours per day - in mandatory study halls and afterschool reading programs. Hour wise, there's not much more room to grow. Good luck convincing parents they're kids need to stay in school beyond 5:30pm.

The "good" news is that this is largely unsustainable as you've got to pay teachers, admin staff, transportation, and provide supplies for all these ambitious activities education reformers keep dreaming up. Schools are strapped for cash as-is. Hell, my old Highschool currently shuts off most building lights in between classroom periods to save on energy costs. This isn't done because the district is trying to be green: it's being done because it's broke.

Ultimately sheer economics will prevent 6-day/10+ hour school days from being implemented nation-wide.

Have the worse-off schools dump their football teams and you'd be financially OK for quite a few supposedly ambitious activities, but that won't happen in many places.

The education you receive at school has little to do with the curriculum in the classroom.

You learn socialization skills, learning skills and interaction with the opposite sex etc. etc. This has been discussed many times on HN.

Education inflation is pointless. These kids are not going to perform better in the workplace or get better grades at college.

Did this prick ever consider that maybe my kids don't want to flush their lives away as fodder in a commercial cold war with China?

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