Scheduling in Schools

An area where American schools do better than Australian I feel, is in textbooks. American English courses have assigned texts and these serve as guides to pacing and assessment of student progress, as well as ensuring that the readings are completed at incrementally the correct levels. It was my experience in Australia that textbooks were available for piecemeal work and not required texts so that each school inevitably does different work and then has it moderated by a board which assigns value to it. This just seems like work creating extra work for the sake of looking to be working. Australian schools until recently had standard textbooks for subjects as well, but this was abandoned, perhaps that choice needs to be reviewed. Incidentally, Australian Education departments are also slowly instituting middle schools, usually where the high school is already occupying the property next door to the primary school. In my opinion, the infrastructure of additional strata of schools is a doubling and a waste of resources that contributes absolutely nothing to the education of our young people, but that is a discussion for another paper.

This whole argument comes back to scheduling in schools and what students have the time to do. I have laid out what I believe schools should do to raise the standards of performance in schools. It should be obvious in the fact that some public school districts are abandoning the block system of scheduling and the private and Catholic schools never adopted it. Despite the drawbacks of the block system such as length of periods and time constraints in school, the human spirit is indomitable and rises to confront and overcome even these situations. This was evident at the last school I taught at in that while I had to devote some time to the mechanics of English, most of the class time in Junior was devoted to reading and studying English Literature. Students practiced writing but not just for the sake of writing. They did it as a response to the analysis of the Literature we were studying. It was very heart warming to see students reliving classics like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible by expressing feelings they’d have in the same situations, this showed a higher order of thinking on their part, to be able to enter into the mind of the writer. This is why I went to university and became an English teacher, to be able to teach concepts and interpersonal interactions in Literature.