("Fly Like an Eagle," Steve Miller Band, 1976)
The talk in school hallways this time of year is all about scheduling
the day within a classroom. Every
authority figure’s pet subject has a non-negotiable block of time that must be
set aside for that purpose every single day, no exceptions. Sometimes pet programs within those subjects
get their own blocks of time too. Often
the sum of these blocks of time is greater than the total time in a teaching
day. The assumption is that if students
just spend enough minutes doing something related to each skill we want them to
know, they will learn at the rate we require of them. I see some problems here.
Example time. I am a horrible piano player. When I took piano lessons, I always spent
plenty of time sitting on the piano bench when I felt I should practice. Sometimes I stared at the music, and other
times my eyes drifted to the ivories themselves. In moments when I felt especially ambitious,
I actually moved my hands over the keys and produced a sound. I found the difficult passages to be less fun,
so I practiced the easier ones instead.
I was good enough at faking the hard parts so my teacher thought I had
rehearsed them, but I never got better. In
spite of the time I spent actually playing the instrument, I never mastered
it. I did the same simple things over
and over and never progressed. Why would
we expect anything different from a reluctant math student? Requiring a child to spend a specific amount
of time doing multiplication will not make the student better at multiplication
unless some kind of learning is happening.
As we know, every student learns at a different pace – which makes the
idea that there is a magic number that tells us how much time every kid needs
to spend on every subject absolutely ludicrous.
I have watched every classroom teacher I know struggle to
fit blocks of this and that special program into their daily schedule. Engineering a schedule that meets all of the
incredibly specific guidelines given to them is nearly impossible. In fact, it probably never happens on a
normal day. It is only possible at all
on paper, when no one has a runny nose or a new baby sister or a shirt he doesn’t
like. Since children are human, they can’t
be expected to behave with the calculated precision of a well-calibrated
machine. We wouldn’t want them to.
Perhaps these struggling teachers could use their time in a
more productive way. If they were not
required to fit unwieldy blocks of time into an already tight schedule, maybe
their discussions with colleagues would focus on instruction instead of how to
eliminate bathroom breaks in first grade to keep the scheduling engine running
along. Maybe they would collaborate with
each other and learn new and innovative ways to teach. Possibly they would find ways to reach
students that seemed unreachable.
It’s not about the time you spend doing something, is
it? It’s all about quality. If you make each minute worth something, then
it won’t matter how many minutes you have.
