Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Poor Elijah just got back from a fleeting vacation in Nova Scotia. One minute he was packing his car, and the next thing I knew I was answering the phone, and there he was.
“What’s wrong,” I inquired, picturing his car dead on the TransCanada Highway and me on my way to rescue him.
“Nothing’s wrong,” he corrected me. “I’m back.”
Apparently he’d missed sitting on his porch, so he’d made a quick loop past the ocean and headed home.
It took him longer to tell me what he’d seen than it had taken him to see it. One point, though, stood out. Nobody in Canada gave him a hard time about having the summer off. They just assumed he was a tourist.
They didn’t know he was a teacher.
Traveling incognito offered a welcome respite from the thousand cheerful “So what are you planning to do with your six months off this summer?” queries he receives from non-teaching well-wishers as soon as the frost is out of the ground. But we’re not here to talk about Poor Elijah’s distress. We’re not here to talk about summer curriculum meetings, or house painting, or the scintillating graduate courses, like “Music and Movement for Reading Specialists,” that teachers get to attend in the off-season.
Never mind all that. This is Poor Elijah’s annual plea for summer vacation – not for his benefit, but for the sake of the children. Teachers’ problems and preferences are irrelevant.
We just work here.
People who favor eliminating summer recess frequently cite the lackluster performance of many American students and the longer school year you sometimes find in other countries where students score higher in international comparisons. A closer look, however, makes clear that the number of days students attend school isn’t the overriding factor.
But if we want a longer school year just to babysit our children, let’s just call the whole thing daycare and stop kidding ourselves. And if we’re saying that too many modern American children don’t have a home to go home to, isn’t that the real problem, no matter what the season?
For example, Finnish students consistently place at or near the top in international comparisons, while the United States languishes near the middle or worse. Finnish students, however, consistently spend far less time in school than our children do. French and American students spend roughly the same amount of time in school each year, about 1,100 hours, but when French students scored at the top of a recent international mathematics comparison, U.S. students scored second from the bottom.
Contrary to what you might expect from all the anti-summer press releases, all but five states already require more time than the international average. It’s also worth noting that all European countries included in the comparisons recess for summer vacation, with most taking summer breaks as long as or longer than ours.
In short, there appears to be “little relationship between more time and improved scores,” with “differences in achievement” more likely to result from “cultural and societal differences,” not from the amount of time school is in session.
The proportion of class time that students spend on academics is a more critical factor. For example, while American high school students were spending only 41 percent of their school day on academic subjects, their French peers, working with the same 1,100 hours, were spending more than twice as much time on academics.
Beyond athletics and the arts, American school days are consumed by everything from driver ed and sex ed to drug and alcohol counseling, social skills, and conflict resolution. It would make sense to address more of these extra-curricular topics, especially the “personal development” variety, somewhere else outside the schoolhouse door, like at home. Ironically, most reform blueprints, the ones that are supposed to make American students achieve more, continue to add to the non-academic chores schools are expected to perform.
Then there’s all the time lost to classroom disruption and standardized testing. Neither is typically as much of a drain elsewhere in the world.
Other anti-summer experts complain about our “obsolete agrarian calendar.” They claim the only reason schools give students summer vacation is that most of us used to be farmers, and we needed our children for fieldwork. This line of thinking ignores three critical points. First, farmers work hard in other months besides July and August. Second, our modern summer recess was actually born when 19th century Americans moved to cities, and the rising middle class opted for summer vacations like the Vanderbilts. Third, and most important, schools never gave children back to their parents. Parents sent their children to schools for a specific time and academic purpose. Most of us still do.
It’s perfectly fitting for you to trust me to teach your child how to read, the same way I trust you to clean my child’s teeth or check his eyes or repair his brakes. But what you do doesn’t require that children spend so much of their lives away from home.
School does. And a nonstop diet of school is no way to grow up. The genius of summer vacation is it gives children a chance to be home.
Some will reply that home isn’t what it used to be, and that many children have two working parents, or only one parent to begin with. Maybe so. But if we want a longer school year just to babysit our children, let’s just call the whole thing daycare and stop kidding ourselves. And if we’re saying that too many modern American children don’t have a home to go home to, isn’t that the real problem, no matter what the season?
Here we are as adults chasing after leisure, and yet at the same time we propose consigning our children to longer days and years at work. Here we are lamenting the demise of the family, while we blithely move heaven and earth to ensure that nobody’s home anymore.
I’m a teacher, and I believe in hard work. But school isn’t the only place children learn things, and it isn’t the only place where they ought to work. There needs to be more to your child’s life than growing up with me.
Be warned.
Home may be where the heart is, but for our hearts to be there, we have to be there, too.
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