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My mother, a school teacher, describes herself and her coworkers as being enthusiastic about more ipads and laptops in the classroom. But the reasons she gives seem suspect to me. I believe that many teachers are supportive of this deployment of tech because of the sedative properties. Give the hyper kids an ipad and suddenly they sit still and stop running circles around their 65 year old teachers.

She says that I'm not wrong per se but that it's still a good thing overall for the kids. I think they should just let the kids run around outside instead (7th and 8th grade have no recess in her district, and PE is only one or two days a week...)

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>7th and 8th grade have no recess in her district

Wait what? Is there some difference in notation since recess (in Finland it's 15 minutes between each class and usually 30min after lunch) is like absolute must for kids of any age. There's even recess in upper secondary school but the lessons are 75 minutes usually instead of 45 minutes as in comprehensive school.

Are you really saying that it's directly from class to another class? That's crazy!

Nope, you get it. It is crazy. The educational system is REALLY MESSED UP in the U.S. Recess doesn't help you do better on standardized tests, so it goes.

I don't know what's wrong with Americans either, and I am one.

When do kids socialize then? Breaks between lessons is how students can get to know each other, grab some snacks, go to the toilet, talk about the game last night, flirt etc etc.

Do you really mean there are no breaks in between? Or you mean there's only 10 minutes to get to the next room? It cannot be 0 because people can't teleport and I assume not everything is in the same classroom.

Here's my district's high school schedule for an example, schedules vary slightly from district to district and state to state but this is reasonably representative:

http://www.rockfordschools.org/high-schools/rockford-high/da...

The breaks in my district are 6 minutes long, with five 71-minute class periods. You can't socialize much in 6 minutes, you have to get from one class to the next, which might be a 400m walk if you want to stop at your locker - walking through a dense crowd of people, with a 15 lbs backpack. Or 200m if you bring a backpack of 40+ lbs of books and binders for all your morning or afternoon classes, stopping by your locker just at lunch. Lunch is 24 minutes long somewhere before/in the middle of/after 4th period. "Zero hour" at the top of the linked schedule is if you want to take an extra class, eg. to accomodate state requirements like civics and communications while also taking year-long AP classes, performing arts classes, or doubling up on science/math electives beyond the minimum.

If you have an average morning bus arrival at 6:50, and add a sport that goes until 5:30PM, and are quick enough to have get your homework done in just an hour each night, it ends up being about the equivalent of a 60-hour work week...pretty rough on a 14-year-old child. But we're a Blue Ribbon Exemplary School! Top 250 in the nation! In spite of the flaws obvious in the schedule above, if my family is going to be in an American school system, and especially if we want them near extended family, friends, and my job, we're not going to do too much better than this: I bought a house in this district so my kid could get the same great education I did.

And then when kids cannot conform to this it's labeled ADD and ADHD (I know that these are also real diseases, but I do wonder how much of it is perhaps caused by schedules described in your comment).

Do you (parents in general) think this is normal and good for a child? I had thought homeschooling was lunatic, but if this is the alternative, I can see why people would choose it.

In Hungary in high school we had 45 min classes and 15 min breaks for the first 3 breaks, and then 10 min breaks. We had usually 7 classes per day, so school went from 8:00 to 14:30, usually. Then lunch if you want.

In primary school we had a break where it was mandatory to go down to the schoolyard to be outside in the fresh air (but then do whatever you want).

WTF are kids doing at the school at 6:30 (Zero hour)? That's ridiculous.

That's an extra class slot available at the parent's election. I took zero hour classes for civics and communication state requirements in the winter of my junior and senior years so I could take AP Physics and AP Chemistry, which were year-long classes that exceeded the science requirements and got me some college credit. In winter, it didn't interfere with sports, and you were going to be up 2 hours before the sun anyways, so why not 3?

And no, there's no bussing for zero hour. You have to drive yourself to school, ride with a parent, or find a carpool setup for either of those.

Thanks for the info. We never had anything such as a zero hour, but various extra-curriculars would take place in the hour or two before school started.

School districts are pressured by parents with jobs to make the school day start early, so that parents and kids can leave the house at the same time in the morning.

Of course, because kids are so dependent on parents. Everything is interrelated. This just wouldn't be a problem in most places in Europe, because kids can take public transportation or walk.

Typically in America, school districts operate buses that are available for any student not in walking distance. Children could (and sometimes do) catch those buses after their parents have already left for work, but many parents don't trust their children with that degree of autonomy.

> but many parents don't trust their children with that degree of autonomy

But I guess it would appear in the school records if they didn't go to school. At least in Hungary the state takes away certain benefits if the kid regularly doesn't go to school and it can also have other consequences as well, like having to repeat the year.

But to some degree it should also be part of growing up. When we were 15-16 and all of us commuted by public transportation, a few times we skipped the first class and went to a pub instead. And I didn't become some lowlife gangster, I completed a CS degree with good results.

When I was in elementary school I was regularly getting on the school bus by myself long after my parents left for work (at that time my mother wasn't a teacher). It worked fine for me and for plenty of other families.

Parental attitudes changed more than anything else. Coddle kids longer, trust them less. That seems to be the current trend.

They talking in the halls, during class, or during lunch. Study hall or detention. And all the while looking for teachers out of the corner of their eye. Many teacher are eager to scold any socializing, sometimes even during lunch, and students are willing to risk a scolding to have social contact. The teachers interpret this as unruly behavior and in an act of circular logic use the perceived unruliness of the children as a justification for scolding students who socialize.

'Gifted' students and those on the honor roll are often given a reprieve from this vicious cycle. But the majority are subjected to it.

I am in shock if that's not exaggeration... But then again this might be one of those things - which do happen a number of times - where an American whom I actually meet in real life tells me not to believe what I read about the US online.

I mean, there are tens of millions of schoolchildren in the US, and they seem to be "fine". Therefore it cannot be THAT bad.

But I do remember from American "highschool movies" (OK not that good of a source) that the students were always on the way to a class, just grabbing things from the lockers, but almost never just chilling, sitting around or similar (except while watching some school sport game).

But how do you even concentrate without taking breaks? That's not even good for standardized test scores. Your brain will just not take up any more info if you don't take breaks.

Everything does vary a substantial amount between districts and even individual schools since at the national level there are only a few guidelines(although standardized tests have crept in since No Child Left Behind), so even with the public system the schools vary between feeding the "school-to-prison" pipeline where students walk through metal detectors and have little breathing room, and "magnet" schools that soak up all the academic achievers and give them back-breaking workloads.

In general the school schedules are arranged for the benefit of the faculty more than the kids, though. The days start too early for most teens, and there's a lot of rushing between overly-short classes, to the point where I recall witnessing some students being marked persistently late simply because one teacher ends the class late and the other starts early. The upside of that is that you do tend to have a break because every single class has a few minutes of administrative work before it can really start.

So when I was in primary school in the US in the 1980s, we had recesses. That is the golden age of those "highschool movies" -- and they were to some extent of course "fantasy" portrayals of high school even then, although not about the time between classes and recesses necessarily.

We also biked to school ourselves unattended. And we had maybe two half-days a year spent on standardized tests, one test each. The insanity of American schools is a more recent phenomenon.

It can vary between school districts though. Generally the wealthier and whiter the neighborhood/city/school, the better the kids will be treated. Although it's pretty shitty even at most of the "good" ones.

What you are reading isn't much of an exagerration though. It is a good reminder of how insane it sounds to you, because IT IS INSANE.

And you say we seem to be "fine" in the US? Have you even been paying attention to what's going on in the US? I don't know how much of it can be blamed on the eductional system... but you know, probably a chunk of it. The schoolchildren and former schoolchildren of the US are decidedly not "fine" though. This place is fucked up.

What's up with the pressure to perform so well on standardized tests though? Are they pushed because the school wants to look good to attract rich families? Or do parents push it so their kid can get to college?

In Hungary we only have standardized tests for school admissions, both high school an university. (so you write one test and can apply to many places with the score). Otherwise every two years there's the PISA international test, but that's only for statistics, it isn't graded. All our other tests are just prepared by the teacher. Of course this means different schools have different standards, mostly depending on the percentage of Roma students. Where they are the majority there is not much learning happening and then non Roma families rather make their kids take a 1-2 hour bus ride to the next town.

I think whole books could be written on "what's with the standardized tests". (and probably have been) As a subset of "What's with wanting to measure _everything_ quantitatively and make evaluations based only on quantitative measures, in our society in general?" For various reasons people wanted an "objective" and numeric way to measure student learning and compare it nationally, so they had to create more things to measure...

But it's not generally the parents that are pushing them. Except maybe to the extent that parents want to know "How do I know if a school is good or terrible?" and someone can give them a "score" built in part on standardized tests...

I think (and this may not be a popular theory), it is in large part a disfunctional reaction to the extreme social inequality in the U.S.. Going back to the days of legal segregation, some people had _terrible_ schools others had good schools. Even once we have legal equality, somehow some schools are still pretty terrible. If only we had an 'objective' way to determine which schools are effectively teaching, and reward those doing well and punish those doing poorly...

In fact, though, it's still the poor and not white who bear the brunt of all this terribleness. I know someone who is a teacher who was at a meeting where the principal was explaining why it was "only fair" to the poor students to have every minute of the day regimented and disciplined, because they too deserved the best education... while knowing the principal sent her OWN kids to a "sudbury school"!

At the high school I teach at, there's 5 minutes between class, with a 10 minute break in the afternoon between the last two. It's absolutely awful.

Ten minutes, maybe five minutes if the school is small enough physically to get between rooms in that time. The break is definitely not meant to be long enough for more than "get to your next class" - and that's from someone from a relatively well-off suburban school district.

Elementary school gets recess, don't remember how long. Middle school I don't remember very well; high school you just get lunch (but are perhaps not restricted to one room to have it, at least).

During the 25 minutes for lunch and maybe 10 minutes before and after school. Otherwise, everything else is what your parents allow.

Sound horrible, like being in prison.

At my school it was 5 minutes to get to your next class. Socializing was during lunch (we got an hour).

In most of the US from what I've seen, recess is seriously degraded for 5th and 6th grades, then eliminated entirely for 7th and beyond. They really expect teenagers to be sedentary until the end of the school day.

I vividly remember recess going away after 6th grade and it bummed me out hard. It's usually replaced by PE or some organized sport, which felt strictly worse in overall enjoyment.

Not sure if it's the same, but in France school was from 8AM to 4:45PM. Which makes sense if you have one or both parents working typical business hours. In my case I paid the school to supervise our son for an extra hour and made sure to conclude my business by 5:30P.

In the US school is typically 8AM to 2PM. There is very little time between classes and the kids have to scramble for the next class. I also found out our son has been missing lunch because the cafeteria line queue is too long to accommodate all the students.

In the US schools attempt to do more with less they have stripped any joy out of the educational experience. No recess, fieldtrips, or extracurriculars. And arts and sciences are a pale comparison of what they used to be. Labs and lab equipment has been replaced by online videos and virtual learning.

My nephew's school in upstate NY eliminated recess periods starting in grade 7. He's in 9th grade and gets 25m study hall 4 days a week. He has 3 minutes to get between classes. They essentially added time for test prep.

When I was in the same school district in the early 90's, we had a 42m recess period at least 3 days a week and either a 42m or 20-25m study hall every day.

For my kids, we bit the bullet for private school. There are some things I don't like about private school, but I'm unwilling to make my son a subject of whatever bullshit social experiment is being conducted. You're only young once, and we live in a world where you need to be top of your game.

My wife (a former PS teacher) just literally created a microschool focused on project based collaborative learning and lots of outdoor activity so that we wouldn’t have to send our daughter to that system. We thought we might get 10 kids enrolled the first year and got 34 and are waitlisted. There is a huge demand for alternatives, and we don’t live in a progressive area of the country.

My wife and I are very interested in something like this, does your wife have a website?

I experienced secondary school in Ireland, France and Germany around 20 years ago and never saw this "15 minutes between class". In all three, as far as I remember, we had 3-5 minutes to get from classroom to classroom, a lunch break of 40-90 minutes, and one or two other breaks of 15-20 minutes. I think this is completely normal in Western Europe.

Damn, I bet the success in education in Finland can be hugely attributed to just having actual recess between classes for all the classes and through the whole basic education (comprehensive school and upper secondary / vocational school).

Here's actually a somewhat recent news on the matter (in Finnish https://www.kaleva.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/aivotutkija-valitunnit...) and here's https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UC_7A7Zpe-FEK__blB6g... a somewhat normal (though day length variation seems to not happen much in this schedule, it does happen all the time in that you can have shorter days by either going to school later or leaving earlier, too) timetable for an 8th grader.

Here's some Finnish 8th grade timetable I found and translated for you:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UC_7A7Zpe-FEK__blB6g...

Teachers try to sedate students because they have nothing valuable to teach. Only a small percentage of teachers have had a profession other than teaching. Some teachers have hobbies that make them interesting, many others do not. New Math/Discovery Math is a failure, because grade school teachers themselves have no idea what purpose it serves.

Students with wealthy parents will do well; tutoring, travel, summer camps, all help with education and growth.

I take offense to the implication here that just because you’ve only taught means you have nothing to teach.

The finest English teacher I know has taught for the vast majority of her career and her methods have a thoroughly proven record of improving writing and reading in students from every walk of life. She has a doctorate in education now, with a dissertation on improving learning methods and and numerous students over her 25 year career have contacted her and thanked her for specifically her methods and pressure that got those students to succeed, not just in her class, but in college and the future.

There are many, horrible teachers who would do better in a career where they are kept far from influencing the next generation, but this woman, with her majority-teaching-career, is not one of them, full stop.

When discussing a group, we need to stay at a group level. Moving between individuals and a group as a whole is not constructive. Grade school teachers tend to graduate with degrees in English/History, and haven't had experiences in work outside of teaching grade school. My solution for this problem is better professional development. Make a 4 day work week, with one day of training in a new career (something completely not related to teaching/pedagogical development).

You generalize in a useless and offensive way. One could also say programmers have mostly only had one job, programmer, and they don't understand how society works and the needs of different jobs. Your solution for that could be better professional development too. Maybe all those tech bros need to get into the real world, see the problems that say teachers face so they can figure out what to focus on.

I have a strong suspicion that there are so many exceptions to your assumptions here that your model is wrong.

My finest computer science teachers never did anything but teach, either. At the high school and collegiate levels. Same with my favorite college English teacher.

I think a more effective route is to regularly fire the bad teachers, so they can’t harm students with their poor guidance.

>>Teachers try to sedate students because they have nothing valuable to teach.

Let's try and break this extreme opinion down into some components.

What is "valuable" to you? Why would working outside of teaching help someone be better at teaching their subject matter? Is this statement for teachers across all levels, or just grade school? How is it that gross generalization opinions are constructive, but empirical personal experiences providing evidence that contradict that generalization aren't?

""What is "valuable" to you?"" I think that these ideas of relativism are dying. I respect people that are good in their field. I value science and disparage things like alternative medicines.

"empirical personal experiences" - this is wrong, personal experience are not empirical.

Was my statement a gross generalization, sure. But;

-most grade school teachers have graduated with very liberal arts degrees,

-there has been a steady devaluation of degrees,

-many are young when they get hired as teachers, out of college,

-wealthy families pay for extra tutoring, and camps, (wealth has always been the best factor in determining academic success),

-in order to teach about something you need to know about something.

If eduction was supposed to be a meritocracy, its failed. It's a systemic failure, no one person is responsible, no one person can save the educational system. Economy and class matter more than education, is the lesson of the last 30 years. Realists and pessimists have long concluded that the purpose of the educational system is to work as a babysitter, it's cost effective.

Okay Mr. "I value Science", let's keep this going. First, all my basis is on the U.S. education system. If you're basing your idea on some other country, I'll tap out because I have no basis.

>> this is wrong, personal experience are not empirical. All personal experience is, by definition, empirical. The definition of "empirical" is here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/empirical. You're literally wrong.

>>most grade school teachers have graduated with very liberal arts degrees Citation Needed. Is "Elementary Education" a "very liberal art"? Who is more qualified to teach 6-10 year olds if not someone with a Masters in Elementary Education (generally the minimum requirement) in your opinion?

>>many are young when they get hired as teachers, out of college Your proposed solution doesn't address this. The 4/1 just means that teachers will now face an additional difficulty, finding a 2nd job to have "real world experience", in order to teach 7 year olds how to read and write.

>>in order to teach about something you need to know about something. Of course. But there's millions of students spread across tens of thousands of school districts. IDK where we're suddenly going to find all of these domain experts willing to take lower pay and miss out on career advancement in exchange for educating children.

>>Economy and class matter more than education, is the lesson of the last 30 years.

I'm sorry, are you only 30 years old and therefor unaware that this is the lesson of the course of human history? Social and economic factors are your majority factors for everything, but that feeds directly into education by allowing for school choice (either by sending to private schools or moving into well funded, higher performing public schools). The fact that you're lumping the "realists and pessimists" together on who has decided what school actually is, shows your contempt for the system. I get that, you feel it's broken (so do I actually, but not at all for the reasons you do). I just find your idea that "all elementary school teachers are bad at their job" to be founded on poor/lacking data and a complete misunderstanding of the specifics of primary education.

Empiricism is about quantifying natural phenomena. Empiricist discussed 'personal experiences' that were physical, as they wanted to exclude the occult and supernatural guff. They didn't mean it is o.k. to count personal anecdotes as evidence.

Admitting that economy and class determine educational attainment, negates any argument that any specific pedagogical techniques are helpful.

Yup. My mother entered school teaching after decades in the private sector. She had held several secretarial positions for CEOS, vice presidents, and other executives at large pharma, travel, etc companies. In other words, she understood corporate america. She entered teaching because that was her dream job, but one she was unable to enter as an immigrant to this country. She loved the idea of teaching and she had done a pretty good job on my brother and I. She wanted to be able to be home with us during the summer.

It took her a few years after getting her credential to see the dysfunction in the system. Old teachers were unable to cope with the young children who need young, able bodied teachers able to deal with their very normal behaviors. Principals would get upset that my mother would allow the kids to go outside, even when recess wasn't scheduled. She had the highest marks in the school when it came to testing, but was denied tenure, because her methods of getting the job done were at odds with her principal. There was a large parental showing at the board meeting, and she ended up being put on administrative leave. Some of her students -- who no longer had to take ritalin to deal with his 'excessive' movement while she was their teacher -- ended up back on the drug. This was all in a lower-income district with a history of terrible results.

From that point on, my entire family has shunned public schools. My brother and I were sent to private schools, and my mother always votes against every issue the teachers union supports. They enable the behavior. They encourage, ineffective, anti-competitive practices which harm students, and enable lazy teachers.

that isn't fair or accurate about teachers. It's just inflammatory. Teachers want to educate and work within the structures that districts allow. They don't pick laptops, the school district mandate textbooks. You've got an unrealistic idea of education.

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