Rabbi Nethaniel Helfgot suggests for consideration a radical departure from the typical North American Jewish high school calendar. In a nutshell he offers for consideration shortening the school day to 3:50 PM daily, instead of the 5:00 -5:30 typical dismissal time, and lengthening the school year through mid-July thereby making up for the, otherwise, lost time. He argues that the current inordinate lengthy day we put our students through, especially when factoring in afterschool activities, transportation, and homework, presents a “challenging schedule that creates a lot of pressure and stress on kids and families.†He adds that by shortening the school day “(l)earning could occur at a more relaxed pace and internalized in a less hectic schedule.â€
Rabbi Helfgot recognizes some of the practical challenges of adopting his suggestion like working around AP schedules that set examination dates throughout the month of May. There are certainly other practical challenges to overcome to institute such a change that may be impossible to control including Jewish day camps, the summer Israel trip industry, summer internships that follow the typical American calendar, and many other impinging factors. But let’s ignore those things for the moment so as to address the core ideas.
Ironically, I serve as the head of school where the high school dismisses at 4:30 PM daily. With the “early†dismissal, we administrators feel we do not have sufficient time to incorporate enough curricular material. “If only we could add another period each day!†Of course, lengthening the academic school year through mid-July as Rabbi Helfgot suggests would overcome that problem.
Although Rabbi Helfgot links the two elements (shortening the school day, and lengthening the yearly calendar) each part is deserving of separate consideration. The lengthy American summer break of 2-2.5 months has been a discussion point for many educators and parents over the decades. Is the long summer break an outlived and antiquated practice based on early American agrarian needs? Do students really need such a long break? What teacher has not noted the great loss of student knowledge from the end of one academic school year to the beginning of the next? Often teachers complain that they need to spend several weeks re-teaching material forgotten from the previous year due to the lengthy summer break.
In my consulting work, I witnessed the Australian school system. They divide the year into 4 terms of roughly 10 weeks each. The break between each term is approximately two weeks and the summer vacation is 6 weeks in length. Added together, the overall vacation time is similar to North American schools, but the lengthy summer break is shortened thereby reducing the interruption of more continuous learning. An additional observation about the Australian school system and other common-wealth countries that impacts on educational progress worth noting is that each day of each week for every Term is identified. Curriculum pacing is better tracked this way. Curricula will specify, for example, that by Day 5 of Week four in Term 3 the following curricular goals must be met and content engaged in. Students receive syllabi that reflect these learning expectations. This specification helps teachers maintain the required pace and manages student and parental expectations of learning in concrete ways far more explicit than typical in American schools. Imagine if our school curricula specified week by week what material was to be learned and what objectives met for all subjects and all grades and this system of tracking Term and weekly progress was shared with all the stakeholders – teachers, students, and parents.
The other element of Rabbi Helfgot’s suggestion and the main objective he seeks to achieve is the shortening of the school day. His assumption is that by shortening the day life will be more relaxed for students and learning will be better assimilated. Clearly the student’s schedule will be less hectic but will that translate into less anxiety and depression, and better learning on the part of our Jewish high school students? I am not certain that public school or private school students with daily schedules similar to what Rabbi Helfgot is suggesting demonstrate better scores relative to Jewish high school students due to the less hectic and a more relaxed day. I would also question whether cases of anxiety and depression are less prevalent among public school students than they are of Jewish day school students as a result of a shorter school day. Perhaps an “overloaded†schedule contributes to more productive individuals and less overall batala than might occur with more available free time.
Rabbi Helfgot’s radical reformulation of the school day and calendar requires us to reflect upon how best to promote healthy learning and capitalize on the best use of time. I thank him for pushing us to think deeply about these questions.
Rabbi Scot A. Berman
Head of School
Farber Hebrew Day School – Yeshivat Akiva
Southfield, MI 48076
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/15/2018 07:39AM by mlb.
