The coronavirus is calling our bluff
It might take five days to read a book you’re enjoying — unless you’re reading it for school, and then takes eight weeks and you’re not allowed to enjoy it. (Image by Pexels)
The legal requirement for school in many places is 180 days.
Why? We don’t know.
I’ve seen students make three years of progress in six weeks when they get excited about the work they are doing.
I’ve also seen them languish for three years without ever making an investment in learning.
It’s nice when there are enough days to offer the potential for growth and transformation. But once that transformation happens, a student doesn’t need to pay attention to the legal requirement. She’s so motivated that she can be trusted to work and take breaks on her own schedule. On the other hand, if a transformative experience doesn’t happen, we end up going through the motions for however many days are left, getting very little out of them.
As many school districts wind down for the year after the worst semester ever, the arbitrariness of the 180 days is evident. Without end-of-year testing or celebratory events, what’s the point? Might as well just let people off the hook and close down early. Nothing’s getting done anyway.
However, as the days lose their structure and we drift into summer, there are some people who are ramping up. I have three students who have set their own math goals that they want help with, and another who will be making art for hours every day. For them, 180 days isn’t enough. They’re on a different trajectory, one that is independent of state law and interference from adults. These students have decided who they want to be and what they want to be good at, and they’ll work as long as they need to to make that happen.
My goal as a teacher is to help a student get to the point where they have the desire and drive to take ownership of their own education in this way. I want them to see the opportunity and how it will be to their benefit to take advantage of it. When that happens, I get to be a coach and a mentor instead of a bureaucrat ensuring compliance.
We could change the system so that it depends on hitting certain targets instead of a certain number of days. But we know that some people will never hit the targets — we don’t know how to help them hit the targets —so we agree to have all children attend school for exactly 2,340 days, or until they reach a certain age, and pretend that it’s their fault if they didn’t hit the targets along the way.
It’s hard to recover from this way of thinking. It’s built into adult life, too — work an hour, get paid an hour; work forty hours, get a salary. It takes a lot of effort to break out of this timekeeping mindset and measure the value of those hours — to think about the results and the impact, the untapped opportunities and long-term benefits. It’s easier to keep showing up, just like school.
The coronavirus is calling our bluff — school doesn’t really have to last 180 days, and 220 days can’t fix what’s broken. As the global pandemic reshapes our lives and societies, we have an opportunity to reevaluate some of our assumptions about how the world works. 180-day school years and 40-hour work weeks keep people in a routine. But how do we stimulate the breakthroughs that make that routine unnecessary? How do we set up a structure that encourages people to make leaps rather than plodding along — and to be rewarded for them? This is what I’m working on, day by day. For 180 days, or however long it takes.