Let me start by saying a “20-minute lunch” is not a real thing. Millions of US students experience that so-called 20-minute lunch daily but calling their experience “lunch” is like calling the January 6th incursion into the capitol building “confusion over opening time.” A lunch of 20 minutes — the CDC calls for this — can be expected to be less than 20 minutes. Yes, many schools allocate a full half-hour, but books must get to lockers, students must get across schools, many people have to go to the bathroom all at once, and then everyone has to navigate that long, snaky line.
See Why Teens Are So Miserable (& How We Can Help) (zdoggmd.com). Zubin Damania is a hospitalist, known on YouTube as ZDoggMD. Aside from his negativity on masks in schools, he nails a number of issues squarely on the head in this video, addressing rising levels of teen sadness, anxiety, and mental health. Our children are becoming more alone, though often more alone with a phone, he observes. Where are the in-person social connections?
Eduhonesty: I’d like to flag something. That 20-minute mastication period does NOT qualify as an in-person social opportunity. Once recess has disappeared, our middle school and high school students lose their venues for social interaction, unless they seize that opportunity in class — as a regrettable but understandable number do. In elementary schools, those recess times keep shrinking too.
Having shared my lunch period with students, I know that bolting down a piece of pizza and and a mug of coffee doesn’t leave time for any real conversation. I still have to throw away my green beans,* after all, and probably take something to the main office. And my kids still have to throw away their milk cartons and green beans, and then go to lockers to retrieve afternoon class materials, fitting in a bathroom break along the way. Not all kids can get out of that bathroom in two minutes, especially girls.
I am writing this post to suggest we share with parents and others a truth escaping many people: Lunch sounds like a break, a chance to talk with friends. However, depending on the school and even the location of a kid’s locker or number of bathroom stalls, that “break” may be PURE FICTION. Like a daily planning period that keeps getting pre-empted for meetings, only some of which result in planning, lunch for many of America’s students does not offer the oasis of friendship its name implies.
To liberally paraphrase an old quote from the 1988 Dan Quayle vice-presidential debate: I knew lunch. Lunch was a friend of mine. Reader, these are not lunches.
Hugs, to my readers. A small blog post that’s a drop of water in a larger, toxic ocean that is sweeping our kids to lonely places, lost in a crowd, often with phones to isolate them further.
*Feel free to look up the sodium target 2 in schools — (USDA’s Final Rule on Milk, Whole Grains, and Sodium in School Meals – EveryCRSReport.com) I don’t want my post to spiral off-topic so I will keep this short. You can get away with barely — or not — salting beans when they are fresh, but after beans have cooked nonstop for hours, only butter or at least salt will rescue them.
Changing standards should never be taken lightly. New standards always require a deluge of meetings and professional developments downstream, meetings and PDs that are followed by the added time sucks of new lesson plans, new lesson sequences, and often new books and software. Those lessons and materials only sometimes mesh well with previous learning. The careful sequences that curriculum committees put together for student transitions from year to year? Any appreciable change in standards risks blowing up all that previous curricular work, leaving numerous fragments of dead and disconnected lessons all over the field.
But who is counting? That’s the real problem in this scenario. Who is tracking the mandatory costs from government and district demands — let alone the fuzzier, sometimes-optional instructional costs that come with professional development, new materials and rewritten lesson plans? Accountants will track new books and software within the district, along with costs for professional development and related speakers, but not all expenses can be laid out cleanly in a spreadsheet. Opportunity costs end up ignored in particular.
A term from economics, opportunity cost refers to the value of whatever you cannot do because you chose to do something else. It’s the cost of the road not taken, and like that road, its outlines are hazy, offering no more than a glimpse into what-might-have-been. What is the cost of not doing something? If a district commits to using its available time and money to build a new extension onto the lunchroom, it probably cannot add a weight room onto the gym. Our districts have a finite amount of time, money and other resources available. Once the addition to the lunchroom is chosen, the district has implicitly given up the weight room. The opportunity cost is the value the weight room might have provided, a cost that cannot easily be determined.
Choices are often mutually exclusive. Every time we force teachers to dedicate chunks of their daytime hours to new brainstorms, those teachers must reallocate their time, and something has to give to make room for Brainstorm #23,489. Those somethings are our opportunity costs and they cannot be turned into hard data, so they mostly end up ignored by administrators and bureaucrats. If Mrs. Brown and Mr. Black are forced to give up morning or afternoon tutoring time to learn their new books and materials, who notices? Besides Mrs. Brown and Mr. Black, that is, who may be silently cursing as they tweak or entirely redo once functional sets of slides they prepared only the year before.
Rewriting standards and making educators drop everything to learn another set of changes…and then devise matching curricula again! …Aaghhh. Yet some states have changed standards more than once in the last decade. The standards situation resembles a remodeling run amuck, as a too-wealthy, too-bored would-be interior designer keeps changing the floors, walls, fabrics, paints and lighting until nothing works and nobody knows what to expect, even as the bills pile up and cracks appear in overloaded plaster. Teachers just start walking around bits and crumbles of plaster, trying to find the now rickety stairs. (Damn, I’m fascinated at how we keep working sometimes.)
We don’t need perfect standards as much as we need to settle on a good set of robust, adaptable standards that we can and will stick with – allowing for desperately needed continuity of instruction. The Core played hell with that continuity, incidentally. That’s a major part of the reason my students were drowning when it was first introduced.* But this post is not about the Core and it’s not about standards. It’s not exactly about opportunity costs, either.
This post is about LURCHING — lurching from one new program or idea to the next. Any teacher could tell those Secretaries of Education, district administrators and other pundits that routine and continuity are vital components of a successful classroom experience. Yes, sometimes gifted students can leap buildings in a single bound but, for the so-called average kid, staggering from one person’s great idea to the next person’s great idea without any rational bridge connecting those ideas… well, it doesn’t work well. If it works at all. Changed curricula leave holes in the learning ladder, a hole invisible to creators of new systems because they already know the curricula. And it’s harder to see a missing piece when you are already certain that piece is in the puzzle somewhere. Let’s say Sergei was expected to learn zygotes in fourth grade but zygotes just moved to third grade instead, a grade that Sergei just finished without learning anything about zygotes. Sergei’s personal curriculum just dropped zygotes entirely, but how is he to know? His teachers probably know but they are dealing with an avalanche of changes. Zygotes can easily fall through the cracks. There are no zygote emergencies, after all. This topic just becomes one more thing to pick up later. Or not.
What our brainstorms tend to ignore is that changes on a macro level throw micro levels out of whack. And micro levels are where our kids live. These abrupt changes are hard on teachers, but they are often harder on students. I said this post is not about new standards, and it’s not. It’s about the people inhabiting — the people living inside — today’s US educational system. Flexes in school routines are inevitable. New information must be incorporated as learning and technology advance. Changing demographics may require shifts in instruction, such as added English language support. Plus an unexpected coronavirus can create dizzying changes in rules and expectations virtually overnight. .
Eduhonesty: BUT WE NEED TO STOP IMPLEMENTING GRANDIOSE SOLUTIONS TO MURKILY-DEFINED, OVERSIMPLIFIED PROBLEMS.
NEW STANDARDS AND NEW TESTS WITH ADDED TEST PREP LEAD TO INCREASING LURCHING DOWN IN THE CLASSROOM. The zygotes go quietly missing, along with the analog clocks and maybe even some critical, fractional pizza slices meant to be added together. Too much is happening all at once. The fractions receive limited practice due to time constraints, and next year’s teacher may have to start almost at the beginning of again slicing up that pizza pie.
I’ll throw in a personal story: I used to be astounded at the number of middle school students I received who could not read the analog clock in the wall at the front of the classroom. “Ms. T, what time is it?” “Is it almost lunchtime, Ms. T?” “How soon is the next class? Do I have time to go to the bathroom?” Class start-times were posted, but it doesn’t do a student much good to know that social studies starts at 10:59 if he or she can’t read the clock.
A spiffy digital Darth Vader desk clock solved my immediate problem, but I wondered what was going wrong. Then I had a long conversation with an elementary teacher who explained that the “clock standard” was at the end of the year, only new standards kept being inserted into her curriculum, and nobody in her school was ever reaching that clock standard before the end of the school year cut them off. That standard then disappeared into the mists. It wasn’t in the next year’s curriculum. Once it “timed out,” it wasn’t anywhere. Since it pretty much vanished from the standardized tests after its slated “year,” no one had an incentive to tack those missing clocks onto the script a year later, even if there had somehow been time, which there wasn’t.
Lurching, combined with testing, can be a lethal combination for learning.
I miss twenty years ago. Before the tests took over, I believe a kindly elementary school teacher would have stepped off the bus for long enough to teach the missing clocks. But he or she can rarely risk doing that now. Everything is too scripted. Too often, the standards have to be on the board and a teacher found stepping off the common, test-based lesson plan can even be reprimanded for not teaching from a sometimes wholly inappropriate script instead. The impact of this set-up is hardest on the kids already on the wrong side of the achievement gap, of course.
Nuff’ said. Hugs to my readers, Jocelyn Turner
*Going sideways for a minute here: The phrase “my students were drowning” sounds like hyperbole, an overstatement. But that phrase is actually an understatement. Drowning may be awful, but it’s fast. What happened to my students and many other teachers’ students was not fast. It was 180 days of being frequently lost, as they were presented with obligatory new material that did not necessarily relate to any previous year’s instruction — setting the stage for long and tougher years to come.
