Teach & Serve V, No. 37
Which Hours Are Yours, Especially NOW?
April 15, 2020
… as you contemplate what is important for your students to do in this Stay at Home environment as the days have turned into weeks and are going to turn into months, as you ask yourself what pieces of your curriculum are central and what are not, as you develop – on the fly – your emergency plans for classwork and “homework”, as you reflect on the way the world has been paused for students, altered and changed, as you consider their emotional state and the challenges their families are facing, as you are mindful of equity, please ask the following question:
Which hours are yours?
I composed this post over the summer long before I, like almost everyone else, had ever heard of COVID-19 or the novel coronavirus. I have revised it this week. In the summer, I had never considered ending in person instruction at my school for the year (as we have now) and had not thought of what our talented faculty and staff would do in an emergency remote learning environment. Thinking about a student’s time was a theoretical. Though I have children of my own and I watched them navigate their academic lives, the consideration of hours in the day was a mental pursuit.
It is not anymore. We who are educators ought to consider in this distance learning posture the amount of time we are asking of our students.
If you are a teacher or administrator at any school level and you are aware of conversations and research around homework – those that were taking place long before Stay at Home orders – you have simply not been paying attention. The mounting evidence that homework needs to be rethought, now, like immediately, like before we do anything else was clear before all work for our students became homework.
However, we do not always have the time we would like to read and research ourselves so, rather than direct you to articles and data (though it IS out there), I will break this down for you very simply.
My wife, who is a talented, veteran teacher, posed this question long before we were figuring out how to adapt the curricula had always taught in person to students either and otherwise. While we were discussing homework and its efficacy, this question is critically relevant right now. She said:
“Which hours do we think are ours?”
“What?” I asked.
“Which of the kids’ hours do teachers think are ours?”
Again, this was a question asked about before and after school hours, but all of that is conflated now, is it not? When we consider our students’ lives and equity in our approaches, access to technology, freedom to complete work, differing levels of self motivation and all manner of other variables facing our students, this question is suddenly about every hour of every day.
What followed was a pretty damned enlightening conversation about the demands placed upon students by their schools, their extra curriculars, their jobs, their families and their lives overall. For our data set, we employed our aforementioned three college-aged kids who were three very different kinds of students when they were in high school.
The questions and timelines we generated were noteworthy.
“If we say classes have a half hour of homework a night (a pretty standard but totally arbitrary measure), and the kid has 4 classes (again, arbitrary), we are talking about two hours a night.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Two hours. On a typical night. No major assignments, no long-term projects. Typical night.”
“Sure.”
“So, school gets out at let’s say, 3:00. We want the kid in bed by, what, 11:00? That’s eight hours.”
And this is where it got interesting. How would those eight hours be carved up? How would they be used?
Because, many kids have two to three-hour sports and/or extracurricular commitments. Now we are down to five or four hours. They ought to have an hour for dinner, too, yes? Four or three hours. Many students work. Many take care of family members at home. The social lives of kids connecting with each other is critically important. How much time for these things? An hour? Two? Do they get to take in any news? Do they get to relax? Do they get to spend time in reflection?
Do they get to breathe?
Our kids did their homework to varying degrees of completion and, as teachers, we assume that is the case, right? Some kids pick and choose what we assign. Some kids “never” do their homework. Some kids, however, do everything they are asked.
And they have limited time to complete their work no matter which approach they take.
Those eight after school hours (which, again, is an arbitrary number and, likely, is too high) disappear most quickly.
Again, this conversation centered around in person learning and assumed a traditional school day and time before and after, but isn’t it all the more important now?
So, as you contemplate what is important for your students to do in this Stay at Home environment as the days have turned into weeks and are going to turn into months, as you ask yourself what pieces of your curriculum are central and what are not, as you develop – on the fly – your emergency plans for classwork and “homework”, as you reflect on the way the world has been paused for students, altered and changed, as you consider their emotional state and the challenges their families are facing, as you are mindful of equity, please ask the following question:
Which hours are yours?