A three month long summer vacation from public school seems stupid

[gmax137]

Woe, woe, woe.
When I was a kid (different times) Saturday mornings were very important to my education.
I learned a lot of sarcasm and irony watching Rocky and Bullwinkle!
Squirrel and Moose rule!

And history from Sherman & Mr Peabody... the original (?) Wayback machine

 

[jbriggs444]

And history from Sherman & Mr Peabody... the original (?) Wayback machine

What about literature from Edward Everett Horton?

 

[sbrothy]

There are a couple of things that we can do to incentivise people to want to be teachers:

1# Raise property taxes to increase teachers' pay substantially

2# Make the teacher's jobs easier by expelling disruptive students.----The first thing to do is restore paddling in public schools. Disruptive students should be paddled. If the disruptive students' parents do not consent to their disruptive sons or daughters to be paddled, then the disruptive student either gets expelled from school altogether or get expelled from the normal classes and has to attend school in a special holding area for disruptive students. In the unlikely event that paddling does not cause a student to stop being disruptive, then the disruptive student shall be expelled.

Why stop with paddling? The girls could use the 3 months reading poetry around bonfires in the woods at night like Bund Deutcher Mädels and we could force the boys into some kind of military education - I had a name prepared but it escapes me. The boys could learn trigonometry for throwing grenades and handling mortars. They would all like that and their time would be spend productively. As a bonus we would have a standing army if someone wanted a blitzkrieg.


(I'm being a little sarcastic here.)

 

[PeterDonis]

After moderator review, this thread has been closed.

 

[Dale]

My apologies for using my mentor powers to post after closure, but I thought my experience might be worthwhile on this topic.

First, to the OP, please don’t post like this here. Simply calling a view “stupid” is not acceptable here. When you have an argument you can present it respectfully. Even here in General Discussion this is Physics Forums and not Facebook.

I live in a school district in the USA that has both year-round and traditional calendar schools. The traditional schools operate 9 months on 3 months off. The year-round schools operate 9 weeks on 3 weeks off repeated four times per year.

Year round schools buildings accommodate 33% more students because the students are split into four “tracks” such that at any time three are in session and one is out. This was the original reason to adopt the practice.

On the year round schedule kids have the same amount of time off as the traditional calendar kids, but they lose less over three weeks than over three months. There is also less student burnout over nine weeks than over nine months.

With staggered tracks there is no big concern with scheduling vacations. And it enables families to take “off peak” vacations (we love Disneyworld in February). Also, local “track out camps” have stable year round business.

The negatives are the difficulty for teachers to get supplemental income. Other than the track out camps not many other jobs need adults for three weeks multiple times per year. The other negative is the difficulty of after school extracurriculars like sports and band. As a result the year round schedule is not offered for high school.

The benefits are real, but so are the objections. Personally, we have had several years of experience with both calendars. We strongly prefer the year-round calendar. But calling a traditional calendar “stupid” is unjustified, particularly in the way presented in the OP (literally without justification)