Education: Playing with a purpose

If you think there's more talk about education reform than meaningful action, here's a reason: Those who have the power to push reform rarely know much about kids and education, and those who know about kids and education rarely have much power.

Ralph Barrett is in the second category. He knows about kids and education, but he doesn't have much power -- at least not the kind that would allow him to change the way "the system" works.

Barrett was Osceola County's 2002 Teacher of the Year. He started teaching in 1971, and does his thing at the old Ross E. Jeffries Elementary School in downtown St. Cloud.

His field is physical education, but if that brings to mind a playground whistle blower, forget it. Barrett's "thing" is helping kids create new neural pathways in their brains via physical activity. To put it another way, he helps kids read, write and compute better by having them engage in carefully designed physical exercises.

For Americans, this isn't an easy idea. Unlike many other societies, we tend to see the "self" not as an integrated whole but as four rather separate selves -- mental, physical, emotional and spiritual.

Thanks for re-posting that thread about homeschooling. We were on vacation then and missed it. I laughed when I read that Missouri requires homeschooling families to spend at least 1000 hours on their schooling. It reminded me of a note I'd received on a homeschool message board once about a study which estimated the actual time spent on instruction in the typical public high school.

"Inge Canon had a lot to say about Carnegie Units at the transcripts seminar I went to recently.
"36 weeks x 5 session x 45-50 min each =135 -150 hours. School administrators then assume that this will generate another 65-150 hours of "outside" preparation. So a Carnegie Unit is assuming 200 hours of work."

Mrs. Canon went on to say that homeschools should, rightly, adjust this time requirement since the tutorial setting is so different from classroom instruction. She then had us read this study done on "Time-on-task" in public high schools. The author of the study was invited to do it, and surveyed close to 2000 high schools. Here are the results:
Gross School Year = 1080 hours
subtract 15% absenteeism=918 hours
subtract 40% of the day allocated to non-instructional activities (lunch, homeroom, class switching) = 551 hours
subtract 12% of class time for administration = 485 hours
subtract 25% for students being "off-task" (various reason, most teachers said they were being conservative with this figure) = 364 hours"

So those states that are demanding 1000 hours of instruction to mirror the time spent in public schools are demanding WAY more instructional time of homeschooled kids than their public schooled counterparts!

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