INCREASING CLASSROOM TIME

Jun 26, 2013 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

While technical and strategic issues must invariably be part of the plan to revamp education in Guyana, what will make the difference in terms of improvements of grades and passes within our schools will not be these issues, but rather simple adjustments to the way we teach and administer and motivate our kids.
President Barack Obama has already caught on to the importance of these small changes. He has indicated that he would like to see children spend more time in schools. He is also keen on longer school days, as well as educators making school buildings more accessible to children during weekends so that they can have a safe place to go and study and interact with their school peers.
In Guyana, most schools are inaccessible to children on weekends. The Churches have greater access to use of the buildings than children who may wish to go there to study or participate in some recreational or sporting activity.
One of the problems that is to be found in many poor homes in Guyana is the lack of a comfortable space for many children to study at nights. Not many homes have a separate study room where the children can go at nights and spend some quality time.
The environment in which kids study is important. If you have a quiet, comfortable room, that locks out the distractions, then your kids will be able to do more in one hour than the average kids without this environment will do in six or seven hours.
Thus, it is important that children have somewhere suitable to study, not just in the run up to examinations, but throughout their school life. In poor communities, particularly in rural areas, the organisation of nightly supervised study groups within schools can make a huge difference in the performance of kids.
Another problem that our children are facing is insufficient classroom hours. There are just too many distractions within the school environment: school sports, examinations, graduations, non-academic events, attending public rallies etc.
The school year is already abbreviated because of a two-month August holiday, a two-week Easter and a three-week Christmas vacation. When coupled with the large number of public holidays in Guyana, it means that our children are being seriously short-changed within the system when it comes to teaching hours.
While there is likely to be mass protest and disruptions, if serious thought is given to reducing the school holidays, at least the education authorities can insist that students write their examinations only during the last two weeks of the school year and that teachers use the vacation period, for which they are paid in any event, to mark and grade these examinations.
Since examinations usually last two weeks in most schools, and since report cards have to be ready for the end of term, it means that no work is usually done during the last week of school. Hardly any work is also done in many schools during the first week.
This means that in a 36-week school year, some six weeks of teaching is lost. Multiply this over a period of 13 years, and it amounts over the course of a child’s school life to more than two school years being lost due to the limited teaching taking place in the opening and final week of school each term .
Consider if a child had two more years in school what a difference that would make to that child’s performance, and this is why Obama’s suggestion about more time being spent in school needs to be looked at. In our case, we do not necessarily need to extend the school day, but simply to ensure that full use is made during the first and final week of school.
If on top of these two years lost, we can reduce the Easter and Christmas holidays by a week each, it means we are adding another half of a year to our children’s education; and if instead of commencing most classes at 9 a.m. each day we add one more hour of classes in the mornings, it means that every week we will be adding one day more of classes to the time spent in school, which translates to 36 more days per school year, multiplied by thirteen years and we are effectively adding close to another two years to classroom time.

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