By Mark
I'm not quite ready for the paradigm shift to year-round-school. However, like many teachers, I am concerned with that "summer brain drain" that inevitably happens when younguns are separated from the oppressive tyranny of teachers for the months of July and August… I don't know about you, but the "three month summer vacation" is long gone where I live. June is for school.
It struck me yesterday (as my ninth grade students were having one of those so-good-it-gives-the-teacher-goosebumps discussions of how various literary elements and author's decision making influence the manifestation of unversal themes) how incredibly far my students have come as critical thinkers. With four days of class before the final exam–then a long stretch with no regular exercise of that mental muscle–my worry crystallized sharply.
Of course, I encourage my students to always have a book they are reading for fun–fiction preferably, but a good biography or nonfiction tome is equally wonderful. In my close-of-the-year parent mailer, I encourage small bites of learning: car-ride discussions of books, online free math games that actually involve computation not monkeys shooting darts at balloons, setting up routine family trips to the library. As we might assume, the students who get this kind of family support and structure are not necessarily the ones who need it most.
What do schools do, or what can they do, or what should they do to keep the minds of students growing over the summer?
Annette… my SAE was raising six acres of peppermint for oil, so you’re speaking my language. I also had an SOE (I don’t even know if they still use that acronym) after high school that helped me earn my American Degree. What you are doing with those kids absolutely prevents summer brain drain! I hope that someday the edupendulum swings back in favor of hands-on skills based vocational options for public schools.
As an ag teacher…I encourage my students to continue their Supervised Agriculture Experiences through the summer and possibly exhibit them at the fair. This at least keeps the students active in the process of problem solving, record keeping and common sense. It also means they are keeping in contact with me and I teach lessons to the students as the need arises for their individual project.
Tessa, I’m curious how that program turns out! I hope that the kids take advantage of it. I am all for summer reading programs (as a HS Eng teacher), but I also wish there was as big a push for summer math maintenance or science development.
My elementary school is trying something new for the summer. We are opening our school library on Tuesday and Thursday mornings so students can come in and check out books all summer long. They’ll be able to come in with parents and read with them or other kids. We’ll have some “guest readers” drop by to encourage kids to keep coming.
More specifically for our K and 1st graders, we’ll be teaching 1/2 hour reading groups for our struggling readers. We don’t necessarily expect them to make growth with 2 half hour groups a week, but we are at least hoping to maintain the growth they made through the year. We’re even providing busing for students so parents don’t have to worry about driving them.
We’ll see next fall if all this hard work pays off!
That analogy would certainly hit home with my 9th graders, except they say “the computer didn’t save my work” rather than “I forgot to hit save.”
At the elementary level, it’s all about reading. I was talking to my students just yesterday and put it to them like this: “Remember when you made a PowerPoint slide show and you do a whole day’s work and forget to save it? And then the next day you open it up only to find that a whole day’s work is lost and you have to start all over again? That’s what happens when you don’t read over the summer. All that work is gone and you start all over again.”
(We had just done a three-day project using PowerPoint to report on our field trip to the beach. Many of them had ignored my frequent reminders to “save your work!” and could totally relate to the analogy.)
We’ll see if it transfers.