Now that school is closed for the summer break, I am once again hearing that being out of school for 90 days from the end of May until mid-August is too long. This familiar concern that assumes that students lose key academic skills during these months is likely valid but may not be as significant as some think. While no one wants a child’s reading skills to regress, I don’t think it is fair to dismiss the summer break as not important or worthwhile. Our mission statement calls for the District to produce students who are prepared to be successful in a dynamic world. Although the District does all it can to meet this mission, some of this preparation must take place when school is not in session. The variety of summer activities, camps and jobs that our students do during this time is one of the key ways for this to happen.
On Friday I attended Project Grad’s closing ceremony for their summer institute. The event was uplifting with numerous examples of what took place during the two weeks. The attending students all seem to have risen to the challenges presented them and pushed themselves beyond their comfort levels. While much of the learning was academic, it was done in a non-traditional way that was fresh and exciting. As we look for summer alternatives for our students, let’s look beyond sitting in a quiet building doing online coursework and instead think in terms of applied learning away from the traditional classroom. There are examples of this going on right now, my sense is that we need more. I send thanks to those agencies (Boys and Girls Club, Kenaitze Tribe, Project Grad) for their work doing exactly this.
One Comment
I suspect that while some of the concerns you hear are truly about academic skills regressing when they are not practiced and advanced, other parents complain about the lack of summer schooling hours more because of the lack of free babysitting. That sounds harsh, but if it is only about a lack of academics, what is to prevent any parent from requiring a minimum of reading, writing, math, and critical thinking through the summer months?
Free babysitting aside, I agree that “students lose key academic skills during these months” as you state and the more thoughtful teachers I talk to don’t expect to continue in August where they left off in May. Rather, they observe a 4-, 6-, to even 8-week regression resulting from taking 3 months off. When EVERY other industrialized, western democracy does more year-round schooling while we continue a tradition from our agrarian past, I suspect, just maybe, dozens of other societies have figured something out that we alone have not. Further, all the individual students I have seen who exceed or far exceed the achievements and abilities of their parents have all had year-round enrichment and more continuous intellectual challenges than is the domestic norm.
Do summer camps have their place? Of course. Are family vacations, dip netting, and working in garden valuable? Certainly. But if a child prefers doing nothing intellectual for three months, I question what has been modeled by the parents and what is conveyed in the schools. Interesting teachers showing you cool stuff is NOT boring, or at least it shouldn’t be. The easiest hurdle to clear is, “Does your child love to read?” If so, you’ve got the “Reading” aspect of the summer handled. If not, you need to spend the time reading WITH your child that you didn’t do when they were 2, 3 and 4 years old.
Once they are reading a few hours every day (I’m dragging my children away from books to play outside, take trips and do chores), are they WRITING? It doesn’t have to boring “Thank you” notes to grandmother. It can be email to friends, even texts in their own cryptic shorthand. It can be postings on forums if monitored by a parent. But it needs to be composing their thoughts for others in a format that gets some feedback, however informally.
And then there’s math. I’m above-average at making math interesting, and having 10 kids coming weekly to the Kenai Community Library to do math with me all summer long proves that I can reach some kids. Maybe you can’t calculate why three-of-a-kind is rarer than two-pair in draw poker (all high-school graduates should be able to finance their college education by playing poker and craps, IMNSO), but you can bake chocolate chip cookies, right? And there is so much math to be done in a making a double batch, much less 1-1/2 batches. Unit pricing in the store, comparing prices plus shipping on-line, gas mileage, family finances, etc, etc. Hopefully your child has had some great math teachers. But if not, you can show them how math is all around us, all the time. Even during the summer.