I always wait for Debbie to schedule her homeschool English classes before I schedule my math ones. This is not because I am particularly polite or self-effacing, any more than a squirrel is polite when it freezes by the side of the road while a semi roars past.
I am merely realistic. Most of my students also take Deb’s rhetoric classes. The opposite of that statement is not true, because Debbie has approximately four times as many students as I have.
So I wait until Debbie makes up her class lists. Then I make notes on which of my students have rhetoric classes. Then I call my students and mothers to find out if they have Gavilan classes or other classes scheduled.
Then I make lists and circles and arrows and eventually end up with something that inconveniences the fewest possible number of my students.
And all the while I hum Tevye’s lament from Fiddler on the Roof, with the words slightly changed to suit the circumstances: “If I had a building, la da DA da DA da… all week long I’d teach math class, one hour per class per DAY! Debbie could teach there too, la da DA da DA da…. Some one else could teach history and science, idle, diddle, didle didle man.”
Each of my algebra, trig, and calculus classes are held once a week, for an hour and a half or so. I check my students’ understanding and teach the new topics and send them home.
The rest of the week they do homework, their parents check it and they bring back what they just could not get done. It works… but it is not optimum.
Optimum for a skill class such as math or a foreign language, or for a younger child is reading every day. Constant practice: that’s the key to mastering skills.
However, the parents of my students do not want to have to transport them to my house for an hour every day, and I don’t blame them. Also, we homeschoolers are mostly single income families and can’t afford to pay each other for five hours a week. So we do our best with homework.
All this may help to explain why I was thrilled to hear that Gilroy High School is reconsidering their current absurd block scheduling, where every class is taught for two hours every other day.
Two hours is an unwieldy hunk of time. It’s too long for a lecture and barely long enough for a science lab. Math and foreign language should be studied daily. Science should be lectured on for no more than an hour twice a week. Science labs should be at least two hours long and maybe longer. English and history are more flexible.
The only kind of schedule that could possibly be worse would be the factory school schedule of six or seven subjects, studied for one hour each. Both schedules have their origin in the same flawed assumption: that all subjects are alike, that all learning is alike and interchangeable and one size fits all.
Scheduling classes of various lengths for various subjects seems a daunting task, and I would not blame any high school administrator charged with that task from throwing up his hands in despair at the very idea.
But just down the road at the local community college, they are placidly scheduling varied class times for various subjects without fanfare or histrionics.
Community college scheduling would be worth looking at for any institution of higher learning dedicated to best practices or data driven decision making.
Speaking of best practices and data driven decision making, this campaign for universal preschool is bugging me.
The July 15 cover story of the Gilroy Dispatch would have any reader convinced that a child who is not institutionalized from an early age is never going to learn his colors or his letters or how to say, “How do you do?”
Baloney! The studies on the subject have shown repeatedly that disadvantaged kids benefit from a good pre-school experience. Kids who are read to and taught manners do not need pre-school.
