Changing Education

Everyone complains about the money being spent on education yet we still keep producing poor students and the number of drop outs. This proposal should go a long way in addressing these issues and for the same cost.

There are 365 days in a year and approximately 261 week days of eight hours in an 8-5 p.m. workday allowing one hour for lunch. The national average school day is only seven hours and in Maine, teachers are required to spend 180 days in school, not necessarily all of them in the classroom. According to a 2009 schedule I obtained from the School Department, our teachers spend only about four of those hours actually teaching. The students are supposedly learning for seven hours. That means the learning time in one year is 1,260 hours. If you allow 20 days for holidays during the year that leaves 241 days in which to accumulate 1,260 hours of learning. That means a little over five hours per day.

At age five in kindergarten most children have a rudimentary knowledge of the language so teaching English grammar is a total waste because they will learn words and context from their friends, from television, radio, the movies, the internet and more recently their hand-held devices. In short, if we stop teaching children what many already know and will never use then the actual learning day can easily be reduced to four hours.

Half the students being taught in the morning and the other half in the afternoon would double the capacity of the existing schools and make more efficient use of the school buses that sit idle most of the day. The only test for this or the existing system is one built around measuring a child’s ability to communicate and knowledge of the rules of a civilized society. A composition graded on the Flesch- Kincaid scale would determine a student’s ability to become a member of society and either go on to college, a trade, or occupation where one learns on the job.

Fred Blanchard,
Brunswick

Lessons from a College Classroom

In my U.S. history classes this semester, we’ve been covering important issues in the early 20th century such as immigration and women’s voting rights. My students at the public college where I teach have reminded me — and should remind all of us — of two things: One, women fought hard for voting rights, even enduring hunger strikes and beatings, and we should not take voting for granted. Two, in connection to America’s democratic vision, immigrants came here to, in the words of one student, “escape corrupt governments and come to America because they will have the opportunity to have a voice.” Another student reminds me that, historically, “America is a melting pot, a country made up of immigrants. We have stopped seeing this in recent years and come to believe that we became great by ourselves when in reality it took many different countries and millions of people from many backgrounds to make this country what it is.

I teach history because I believe it helps us understand our present, sometimes offering useful lessons and sometimes cautionary tales. It occurs to me that, in moving through these first months of 2017, lessons from the histories of voting rights and immigrant experiences never been more important or relevant, and I couldn’t be more proud of these young Mainers who also know this.

Allison Hepler,
Woolwich