The current Time Magazine ( August 2, 2010) reports on the so-called “summer slide” where the learning progress of lower income students has been documented to flatten out during the summer. Although the enrichment enjoyed by students in the upper half of the economic spectrum is credited with maintaining their summer progress in learning, the interruption of regular literacy routines could easily account for the “summer slide” for any student.
Having witnessed this slide for twenty years of high school teaching, I love to theorize about its causes. But there are perspectives to a summer vacation– what happens before and what happens afterward. What happens before is another good reason to shorten the summer vacation.
Clearly there is a lapse in literacy skills at the beginning of the school year. Reading and writing are analogous to physical skills– they atrophy with lack of use. I can even see this from my own experience as a reader and writer. When the baseball season begins, I often lose my grip on literacy. I watch baseball, read about baseball, listen to talk show chatter about baseball, and I might even write about baseball. While I consider baseball a highly intellectual sport, I also notice that my reading and writing of professional or literary content slides. Returning to other intellectual reading and writing is a struggle. It is like taking a ramp up to the freeway. You push the accelerator, but everything is slower and more deliberate. My reading and writing are in first gear. I would consider this analogous to the “summer slide.”
But there is also the effect of summer vacation on the month before it. Anyone who has taught in May or June in a K-12 school knows the “law of distraction gravity.” When a large vacation approaches, the small mass called “concentration” is pulled toward that large body. Concentration is always in danger of bursting into fragments as it approaches the large vacation. The same phenomenon exists with smaller bodies of vacation like Christmas or Spring Break, but the size of the body definitely affects the extent of fragmentation. I call this the “law of distraction gravity.”
With the saturation of media and technology in our lives, the distractions from the focused activity of reading and math are amplified all year around. The dissemination of cell phones, MP3’s and laptops has created a battleground for students’ attention in January as well as June. This is not to say that new media may not be useful for formal learning, but it does create a competition between systematic learning and recreation for students at all ages. We even see it in college classrooms, where professors have felt compelled to require students to turn off their laptops just to engage their attention during class.
So now education is drifting through what might be considered an asteroid belt of media distractions that can draw concentration away from learning at any moment. Nothing can resist this intensifying of media distractions, but they can be balanced all year around by learning to live with gravity. We live in a cosmos of constant distraction. This is our life. We must learn in it. So now comes year-around schooling.
If the K-12 academic year were constructed more like the college academic year–in three equal trimesters— we could balance our attention and inattention all year around. There are three fifteen-week segments that split our three favorite vacations: Christmas, Spring and Summer. Each interval will be followed by two weeks’ break, in the summer three weeks. The final week of each trimester is an exam week, so there might be ways to extend even the fourteen days that interrupt the academic stretch. We will never leave school for more than four weeks, however, and the distraction gravity will be equally distributed over the entire 45-week cycle.
The idea is not new, but it has many cultural deterrents, not the least is how to pay teachers for 20% more teaching every year. The cost is almost prohibitive, but there ought to be a way to compromise between increased salaries and increased released time for teachers. Teachers can be released on some afternoons for professional development, for intellectual projects, and for recreation, while paraprofessionals replace them in tutoring or study hall conditions. Afternoons, it turns out, have a distraction value of their own. Students are often engaged better in one-to-one learning as the sun reaches it zenith. Especially on Thursdays and Fridays, as the weekend approaches.
This proposal for year-around schooling is not a call for more intense learning, but for more consistent and rhythmic learning. The Law of Distraction Gravity can not be defeated, but it can be exploited. Instead of surrendering to Distraction before and after summer vacation, we can compromise with it all year around. It sounds like a great theory, and I think I’ll call it the Theory of Learning Equilibrium.