Four Days of School

I've been told that this 4-day school week is the newest educational controversy... school districts do have to find a way to cope with the higher prices of gasoline and heating bills, so expect this to be an issue for small rural districts first.

Brownsville PA is exactly that. They are looking at switching to a four-day school week to save energy costs, and they are making plans to have longer school days in order not to lose overall instructional time. (article) But Superintendent Lawrence Golembiewski wants to cut Mondays, unlike the Fridays suggested in other districts.

To accomplish the switch, he'd add about 15 minutes to each class period to cover the same amount of material over four longer school days. He favors Monday as the day to close, figuring it would be counterproductive to close on Friday but keep schools heated for sporting events on Friday nights.

"We live in Western Pennsylvania," he said. "You cannot touch King Football."

This makes a lot of sense, financially. What are parents going to do with their kids on that new day off? And will No Child be Left Behind? It's hard to predict... if it has never been done before. But it has.

Financial problems prompted the East Grand School District, about 80 miles northwest of Denver, to adopt the four-day week in 1982, business manager Flo Glenn said. District officials heard many of the same objections about longer days and child-care problems, but she said the district has realized savings in transportation and heating costs.

Good. But academic performance?

Teachers report that they now cover about 20 percent more material each year because classes are longer and students have more time to remain engrossed in discussions. Test scores also went up "a little bit," but he said other factors contributed to that increase.

I assume this is an 8-period day, not block schedules. I wouldn't want my students for 2 hours at a time.

Student participation in school activities has increased because students believe they have more time to balance extracurriculars with homework, Creal said. Teachers, too, like having an extra day to plan lessons and projects.

I'll bet they do. I am about ready to forward this to my own superintendent.

The East Grand website includes several great sources of information, including the Colorado Department of Education 4 Day Report. Please check these out.

The Four Day School Week

In Jackson County, KY, the students will be getting a three day weekend.

Every weekend.

Across Kentucky, school districts are cutting field trips, redrawing bus routes or curtailing athletic events to cope with rising fuel costs. But no one's making quite as dramatic a change as Jackson County.

Starting the week of Oct. 17, students will get every Friday off. Teachers will work half a day.

With the move, approved by the school board Sept. 5, Jackson becomes the fourth school district in the state to implement a four-day week, and the first to do so primarily for financial reasons.

What a great lesson for the students: If gas prices go up, take more time off.
Incidentally, I found this article via In The Agora.

A Problem With Higher Education?

I just read the article Warning Signs about Higher Education, by Alexander H. Joffe (director of Campus Watch). It is this kind of writing that makes the American Right sound so lost. Mr Joffe bemoans the state of American Universities, saying they "have a deeply negative impact on American society, its sense of cohesion and dignity, its perceptions of right and wrong, and ability to do good in the world... [and they have a] hostile environment toward people with traditional religious beliefs."

Joffe claims that some of his friends have decided not to let their children attend a university, because campuses are so dangerous to the morals and intellect of students. Yes, shelter them, that will ensure their success. [/sarcasm] It is disturbing to me to read his contradictory statements.

Consider these two from the same article:
"The middle class believes that academics and the environment they create on campus, in politicized classrooms and generally in terms of permitting or even encouraging any type of behavior, is antithetical to the values it has struggled to convey to its kids..."
And,
"The liberal arts no longer appeal for their own sake to a wide swath of the middle class, since they no longer reflect values of free inquiry and tolerance for others."

So is the problem that students are permitted and encouraged to inquire freely about the people of the world, and the lifestyles or beliefs of people unlike themselves and their parents?
Or is the problem that students are no longer able to inquire freely about the people of the world, and the lifestyles or beliefs of people unlike themselves and their parents?

Surely Mr Joffe would say that I have missed the point. But when he claims "The first step is for academia to realize that it is they who have lost touch," any critical reader should recognize that Mr Joffe is out of touch with both academia and the average American.

What would cause academia to feel that they have lost touch with anybody? American collegiate enrollment is higher than ever before, especially in the parts of our society where it used to be an unattainable dream. American universities are the envy of the world - grab the Sept 8 Economist if you don't think so. Any private corporation would be ecstatc to have the growth and success that American universities have been having over the past several decades - academia would laugh you out of the room if you tried to make a serious argument that they have lost touch with our society as a whole, or any subgroup within it. Mr Jaffe's argument sounds naive without some hard evidence that it represents anything beyond the most extreme religious minority of our population. And frankly, I went to college with people like those Mr Jaffe claims are becoming disenfranchised. Most of them had strong enough religious convictions to get through school unscathed, or else were already losing their faith before arriving at college.

In short, there are definitely problems with higher education. I can't see that Mr Jaffe knows what any of them are.

NOAA Hurricane Hunters Getting Drones

It may not be as romantic an image
as a small prop plane with salty, gritty air jockeys chomping on corncob pipes and bracing against the bucking turbulence of the outer bands of a developing hurricane in order to provide us with the relevent data like atmospheric pressure and wind speed... but it's cool. And it's useful.

NOAA is hoping to use unmanned drones (Aerosonde platform) to investigate certain aspects of hurricanes that cannot be safely investigated by other means - specifically, conditions at really low altitude inside tropical storms. The report is here, and it lists two primary scientific objectives;
to observe and better understand
- The surface ocean and atmospheric boundary layer environment ahead of and along the projected TC track
- The low-level inflow layer associated with a mature hurricane.

A (short) related NASA article here.

We will definitely be talking about this in class. Chapters on flight are coming up soon, and the students always want to know more about hurricanes - probably even more so this year.
Thanks to this political blog where I first found the story.

Job Security

"Forced Out by Storm, Teachers Seek News of Job Openings, PayHost states relax hiring rules, while federal government mulls ‘highly qualified’ waivers."

Woooo - what a situation. Some people who have been displaced by Katrina are looking at starting over from scratch. What would draw me back to where I currently live, if all of Virginia were destroyed? Not a thing, I guess. I would quickly find myself living with family in another state (I've got a couple of options), and if I had to pick up a new job there, I think I would buy a house.

New Orleans will be struggling for years and years to replace their infrastructure and qualified public servants. A third of their police force is reported to have left the job, and that was a bad force to begin with. What a nightmare, all around.

Technology Stinks

I spent 90 minutes before classes this morning trying to get the printer working. Any of the printers. Any one of the (counting, counting) 9 printers I am supposed to have access to at my school.

Understand that I am about as computer literate as you can get without being paid to be a computer geek. But something in this new system sucks. I don't know what the problem is, but it is going to get pretty critical soon.

After school I got a chance to see the Film Club for the first time since June. The Film Club at our school does not watch films or discuss the social impact of films, as I had supposed when I first heard of them. They make films. As I now enter my 13th month of sponsoring this club, I have to be honest and admit that I have never done a damn thing for them. They are completely self-driven, extremely motivated, and really good. Other than providing a room for weekly meetings and access to an LCD projector, my major contribution has been to read scripts and watch footage while saying, "Great but inappropriate." "Really good story but the school cannot sponsor you making a film about a teacher who murders his students, even if an angel dismembers him at the end." "That goes beyond innuendo and is just plain sexual." Etc. Sometimes I really feel like I am being a dick... a real Principal Richard Vernon. They assure me I am not, but I hate stifling these 17 year olds on issues that I really don't think are a big deal, personally. My life as a teacher.

First Entry

Not much to say in the first entry. Today I walked my AP class through the formulas of constant acceleration and free fall, and then tried to keep that same pace with my honors class. The big differences between the two classes are 1) the AP students have mostly taken a physics class before, 2) the AP students are on average taking higher math classes, 3) I only have 10 kids in the AP class, but 3o in the honors. Because of these facts, honors stopped at the beginning of free fall.

I did get through free fall in my Conceptual class, which is for students whose math skills are poor. We keep it below trig in that class. I took that class out to the football field today and re-enacted the experiment for which Galileo is so famous (and which we have no evidence he actually did); Dropping stuff from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. We dropped a golf ball and a bowling ball from the top of the bleachers. They knew what was supposed to happen, probably from their middle school course, but it got us outside and helped establish after a week of class that physics might actually be a fun course. We'll see how long I can keep that up.