SAT Prep Course B, Topics

I spent some time looking over the sample test and "sorting" by topic (or Proficiency, if you will). This list will morph a bit as ETS reacts to to results of the first few administrations, but it feels very much like it always has, with some updates.

My philosophy is to move from the obvious and the simple to the complex and multi-stage in each topic. Level one questions through level 4: "Easy", "Medium", "Hard", "Ignore Unless".

If the students are answering easily, jump to later questions. If they screw up, add in more scaffolding. Everything I do in SATPrep has already been "taught" - I provide the review and some test-taking strategies that are specific to the SAT. I also believe in using the old ETS question-type of Quantitative Comparisons as they provide a great opportunity to have good Number Theory discussions.

Here, then, is what I see:
(Please add anything in comments)

Arithmetic

1. compound fractions, mental math.
2. rate, ratio, proportions 
3. percents and decimals
4. Pythagorean Theorem
5. Pure Radicals ( √300 = 10√3)
6. Stats: five-number summary, central tendency & number theory.

Algebra

1. linear functions
2. scatterplots w/ writing equations
3. inequalities
4. linear systems - all three methods
5. bar graphs, line graphs, odd choices for independent/dependent, other graphical interpretation. These are now included in the reading section.
6. stats (mostly central tendency) and probability
7. functions and function notation
8. quadratics and complex numbers
9. late algebra 2: rational, radical, polynomial functions

Geometry

1. Lines and angles
2. Similarity (proportions, part-part or part-whole) and Congruence
3. Right triangle trig
4. Circles
5. 3d shapes
6. Pythagorean Theorem, radicals ( √300 = 10√3) as used in geometric questions

English

1. Grammar - common grammatical errors. These are fun.
2. Graphical Interpretation for the math that has been mixed in with the Reading
3. Vocabulary - Latin and Greek, looking for patterns.
4. Essays types - more about rejecting English class writing in favor of brutally efficient five-paragraph format.
5. Reading non-fiction for content and vocab rather than talking skills

There is no teaching of reading skills at this level, only exposure to more reading. I assign essays, research, and articles written by college professors, scientists and other intelligent writers. "The Median Isn't the Message" by Steven Jay Gould, for example. In choosing, I look for complex sentence structure, dense thoughts, broad vocabulary and a willingness to assume the reader has a brain.

Next: some of the worksheets and problem sets.
This may take a few days because I want to wrangle things and rename files.

SAT Prep Course A, the Set-up

So, you've been allowed to create an SAT Prep Course (or assigned one). What now? Pat yourself on the back and be ready for a wild ride.

The first thing in your planning is to eliminate the idea that this will be a math class, taught like any other math class, made up of students who resemble a typical math class.

If your assignment is anything like mine have been over the years, you will have an incredible mash of abilities and a mandate to "Do something".  In no other mathematics scenario will you get a math class with honors pre-calculus students and informal geometry students at the same time. In one sense, this is a recipe for disaster. It can be managed, however.

To start with, your students will all suck at math. (No, really!) Even the best ones have forgotten the most basic ideas. √300 = 10√3 - what magic is this? Proportions and fractions - who knew?

Your goal is to teach everything from pre-algebra to pre-calculus in one-half a credit ... partly by "quick reminders" and 10 question quizzes, and mostly by a thorough cleaning-out of all the topics the test won't cover ... and they don't cover a lot.

Of necessity, the tests are very predictable in their choices of topic and question. They are predictable in their style. This is what makes them good comparisons from year-to-year.

It is at this point that many people pooh-pooh standardized tests and decry the amount of time spent preparing for them and wringing hands over the lack of engagement ... fuck that.  You need to be on-board with testing, just this once.

You need to be encouraging and instill a sense of us vs them, us vs the test-makers.  This is a competition between your students and some question makers ... and your students can win this thing.

Yes, the test is biased against black, Latinos, poor people -- so what? They still need to win this game. Yes, testing is bad, but rebelling against the system is stupid because it doesn't make you better at testing, or at taking the SAT.  "If you aren't taking the SAT, why are you here?"

Yes, this is taking time, which is why your school isn't asking the actual core courses to include this stuff.

I can tell you which questions are easy or difficult, and why, without seeing the test. By the end of your first week, so will your students.

Finally, this is not a math test, nor is it an English test. It can be manipulated and out-thought.  The essay isn't meant to be graded by your kindly, old Dr. Phillpots, chairman of the SHS English department, and 35-year veteran teacher. It will be read by (maybe) college graduate, or high school graduate, earning $10 per hour, given 45 seconds for each one. All of the math test will be scored by a machine.

Fortify yourself. Your new Prep course will run against everything you think of as a typical HS math or English course. Repeat the mantras,

• "Us vs Them". 
• "It's not a math class, it's a prep class." 
• "We won't cover everything. We are reviewing (and maybe filling in a few holes). You've already taken Geometry."
• It's scored on a curve."
• "We're always looking for improvement."
• "The course is pass-fail. The test is a number in search of an improvement."

So let's get going. Action Step One:

Get the four sample tests and scoring guides and answer sheets from collegeboard.org (make an account, if you have to) on the practice test page. Take the first test and read through each section carefully; familiarize yourself with the general type of question, seeming difficulty, topic. This will help you understand what I'm talking about when we discuss things further.

 You should start with reading the sample test through from start to finish. This is NOT the test you took when you took an SAT before applying to college. The format is different, the pacing is different, the topics are slightly different and more advanced, and the resources that your students will have access to are immensely different.

If you want to take it yourself as a refresher, feel free. Download, print, and go. Follow the directions and stick to the posted times.

I'll check back in again in a couple of days.

Working in Isolation vs Collaboration

from Dangerously Irrelevant:

Joe Bower said:
I would never ask students to complete anything that is worth doing in complete isolation from their peers, parents, books, or the Internet. I’ve worked hard to encourage my students to see collaboration as a critical characteristic of learning.

I would never lock my students in a closet, forcing them to do meaningless work for years and letting them eat only a small bowl of thin porridge each day. That's the way that reductive capitalism works: a sweatshop producing clothing for Walmart, not the education that we desire in this country. 

Joe is, unfortunately, making the same mistake that almost all "Collaboration Uber Alles" proponents make. There are three stages to learning in my view; true collaboration is appropriate and achievable in only one of them.

First, a definition: Collaboration is working with others to do a task and to achieve shared goals. Good enough to begin with.

The First Stage

First Stage Learning.

• The first stage of education is learning the basics, learning the foundation work upon which the understanding can be built. If we are examining A-SSE.2, multiplication of polynomials is required before we can possibly recognize and utilize structure in expressions. You need to have done this first part before being able to recognize that x² - y² is equivalent to (x+y)(x-y). 
• This is strictly solo work in that the student must be doing the learning. The teacher and classmates can explain, describe, tutor, re-explain ... but acquiring this preliminary knowledge is the job of the individual. No one else can master it for him, they can only master it for themselves. 
• Collaboration does not exist at this stage, only parallel learning. Peer coaching is not collaboration, but a "multiple-teacher" scenario. This is where formative assessment is appropriate because we absolutely do NOT want any misunderstandings to be introduced or practiced or internalized — errors must be fixed here before they are ingrained.
• The Internet, their peers, parents, books, are useful in that they are teachers with varying degrees of understanding ranging from competent to utterly and absolutely wrong. The "wrong" can be misguided, such as the videos put up by well-meaning folks who say that the order of operations is "multiply first, then divide", thinking 30 ÷ 2 * 3 equals 5 instead of 45. The "wrong" can also be peers playing a joke, such as the "friend" who says that 26 ÷ 65 equals 2/5 because you can cancel the sixes. Of course, the "wrong" can be malicious or deluded, such as the folks who claim that the Earth is 6000 years old.

Andrew Old:

"If you want to learn how to cooperate effectively with others, then the last place you’d start is in a group of teenagers being made to do school work. This is like saying the best way to learn how to make pork sausages is by being imprisoned in a pig farm with a half-dozen rabbis. Putting together people who are neither experienced at doing something, or particularly inclined to want to do it, is not how you learn to do that something."

The Second Stage 

• The second stage is the time when we take that basic knowledge and develop it, building the deeper understandings that are our goal. Some collaboration happens at this stage, but mostly the individual is exploring, researching, expanding the understandings that are the point of this whole thing.
• Again, the peer-to-peer work that is happening here is less "learning" and more taking turns questioning, extending the idea (does x⁴ - y⁴ behave in a similar fashion?) Where else can we go with this? 
• The Internet, peers, parents, etc., are still not collaboration, but they do contribute to the student's learning. In fact, this is the ideal time for students to see other points of view, watch different explanations and determine the correlations and reconcile the differences. I encourage watching Khan at this point with the question, "What do you think of his explanation?"

At the end of Stage Two is the usual spot for summative assessment, the dreaded chapter test. Why "dreaded"? Because the students have JUST internalized it but rarely are comfortable with it yet. Done properly, though, the chapter test is often the fusion of all of the disparate details, the time when the students have to put everything together. I often hear students say that "Now I understand."

It's also why I allow retakes, because I feel that understanding on a deadline is less important than being able to say at the end of the course "You know Algebra 2".  I suppose this is the essence of Proficiency-Based Learning, but I have never liked re-labeling what we do in order to pretend that we are reforming.

The Third Stage

Re-purposed wrecking ball.

• The third stage of learning is the time when students get comfortable with their understandings, where they extend an idea, test it, and revise it themselves, where they produce a product, something new — to themselves at least, if not to the teacher or the world, but there are certainly cases in which the work was completely new, an invention or discovery.
• This is the only place where collaboration is actually realistic. Since I define "collaboration" as "multiple students working on the same project, contributing to each phase of the work and trusting each other to complete their respective parts", I cannot see collaboration as the time when you are learning the material, but as the time when you take that learning and produce something.

We must discuss Alfie Kohn:

“I want to see what you can do, not what your neighbor can do” is really just code for “I want to see what you can do artificially deprived of the skills and help of the people around you. Rather than seeing how much more you can accomplish in a well-functioning team that’s more authentic like real life.”

If we are discussing education, then I absolutely DO want to know what you can do, what you have learned and internalized. How else am I to re-teach, help, differentiate?

Joe Bower, again:

"In the real world, there simply aren’t that many times you are expected to solve a problem or perform a task in complete isolation – and even if you were, it would be awfully archaic to refuse you the opportunity to reach out for the help you needed to get the task done.

In the RealWorld that I've been a part of, there is not a single company that didn't expect a baseline level of knowledge and understanding. They have no interest in an employee who can't work alone, or who can't do his part of a collaborative task. They don't want someone who needs to consult other resources constantly, in order to do the simplest of tasks. They want to know how good a resource you will be when someone has to ask you for help.

Bottom line:

• Collaboration is students each working from knowledge and understanding to produce something together, sharing the work or parceling out pieces for each to work on simultaneously.
• Collaboration is not a pathway to learning and often is detrimental to the learning process since many students leave the thinking and learning to the quickest in the group ... "He answered so I don't have to think about the question." or "I'll just repeat what she said."
• Collaboration before all of the partners are proficient is counter-productive. If all participants aren't at the proficient point, there will be one who winds up doing most of the work in frustration, worried that her grades will slip because the quality of the product is below her standards.
• Collaboration is not a substitute for teaching.

Thanks for reading. I've got to get back to work.

Regular Class work is so Helpful.

I find that a regular activity is a good thing. The students look at it as a useful digression and happily go about working on it ... then they realize it fits right in with what you've been doing.

@fawnpnguyen: "I was brainstorming with a couple of 6th grade math teachers at another district, and we were listing out a possible warm-up/math talk schedule, something like Monday: number talk; Tuesday: visual pattern; Wednesday: estimation 180; Thursday: fun fact, or WYR, or Keeping Skills Sharp, or SBAC/review question; Friday: personal reflection.

Here are a couple of those ideas and one or two others:

Estimation180 - building number sense by estimating values from images or video. This is valuable because so often we say "Does that answer make sense?" If the students have little to no experience with the subject of the question, and no practice making estimates, then answering our "Sense?" question is an exercise in random answer generation.

• There's a worksheet or develop your own.
• estimation180.com  

One Hundred and One Questions - An image or video is presented and students ask any question that comes to mind. While I personally wish the prompt was "What math question comes to mind here?", it is a good place to help them develop the ability to ask questions of the world round them and to see that math isn't just a classroom activity. Browse beforehand and record the links of the ones that fit your current material or your mood.

• 101qs.com 

Math Arguments 180 - The goal is to have students question their assumptions and bring those assumptions to the front of their minds for conscious consideration instead of letting them hold on to common misconceptions that mess up their thinking.  Still in the development stages. The Math Concepts Challenge is also for teachers, though your students might be charged up for it.

• matharguments180.com
• Math Concepts Challenge

Visual Patterns - Practicing the art of understanding the pattern and setting an equation to it in order to predict the value at step 43. I've been thinking it needs more patterns that aren't straightforward linear functions, but if that's the age you're working with then here is a bunch.

• www.visualpatterns.org

Math Talks - Prompts for discussion with your students.

• mathtalks.fawnnguyen.com

Would You Rather? - students are presented with a choice. They choose and then have to justify their choice. "Would you rather have a bag of nickels that weighs as much as you do or a stack of quarters as high as you are?"

• wyrmath.wordpress.com 

Graphing Stories - a video is shown and the students need to create a graph of some data from it. The video contains a graph blank that shows the independent and dependent variables. Usually, these are time-series graphs of height or altitude, but if you only show the "action" portion, you can have them graph whatever quantities that come to mind.

• graphingstories.com

The UVM Math Contest - Problems from the University of Vermont High School Math Contest. These are given in the spring of Pre-Calculus and are meant for mature students who have had a good algebra II background. These questions are to be solved without a calculator or technology of any kind; figuring out the method is the whole point. Attempting a whole test in the allotted two hours would challenge even the best math teachers. Scores of 15 out of 41 are considered excellent.

• mathcontest.blogspot.com

Things We Need You to Stop Saying, part 1

There are a couple of things we really need you to stop saying. The first:

"The right answer isn't important. It's knowing what you're doing."

No matter how you parse this, it's ridiculous. The right answer is the whole point of doing the problem ... has always been, is now, and will always be. The "knowing what you are doing part" leads to the right answer. If it doesn't, then you don't know what you are doing.

Variations on this include: "It's the concept that matters" and "We're putting the emphasis on the method." It shows up as sarcastic responses from Institute Professionals and college professors, too:

@MathCurmudgeon Good thing math is only about answer-getting, then! Phew!
— xxxx (@xxxx)

What we should be saying is "The right answer is vitally important ... so important that we also want students to explain the method and how we all know the answer is correct; they must be able to detect an error if it occurs and describe how to fix it so that the solution IS correct."

If you go to the trouble of having the students communicate, verbally or in writing, how they solved a problem, then you are focused on the right answer ... there would be no need to explain anything, or fix errors, if you didn't care about it. You'd take any randomly achieved answer as long as it was correct, and move on.

Just cancel the 6s.

Does anyone ... ANYONE ... seriously think that the right answer doesn't matter here? I don't consider this a "right answer" even though it looks like it.

I'm going with "No."

You'd take a wrong answer that looked like a right answer if you weren't paying attention.

Just cancel the x² from numerator and denominator.

One hallmark of mathematical understanding is the ability to justify, in a way appropriate to the student’s mathematical maturity, why a particular mathematical statement is true or where a mathematical rule comes from. There is a world of difference between a student who can summon a mnemonic device to expand a product such as (a + b)(x + y) and a student who can explain where the mnemonic comes from.

That is a far cry from "The right answer isn't important."

For example, mathematically proficient high school students analyze graphs of functions and solutions generated using a graphing calculator. They detect possible errors by strategically using estimation and other mathematical knowledge.

You can't detect errors unless you know the right answer, or at least have a sense of what that right answer should be.

Even the infamous "Letter to Jack" assumed that the kid could get the right answer, then could find the error made by the other kid ... the assignment went two steps beyond the right answer: explain the error to the other kid and help him fix it.

JD2718 banned FOIL, Dan Meyer used immediate feedback, countless teachers rearrange PEMDAS (as BEDMSA) to avoid this:

We need them to explain what and why.

I often "let them in on a secret" and share the mnemonics after they get the understanding ... especially if the mnemonics speed up computation so we can get on with what we are actually doing, but every teacher worth his salt knows that you have to periodically make sure that random, blind luck isn't at play.

The last reason that we need to stop saying "The right answer isn't as important as knowing what you're doing" is that too often we teachers are speaking to people who don't know that it is merely step 1, namely school boards, administrators and parents.

I watched a young teacher from another school give a presentation to her school board. Among other weird things, she came out with this statement ... immediately, board members latched onto it.

"What do you mean? Of course the right answer matters."
"I've been in business for forty years; every time, the right answer matters."

She doubled down ... "No, they need to know HOW they are solving the problem." No one was buying it, nor should they have. Whether she didn't understand their concerns herself or honestly didn't believe that the right answer was so vital, she certainly couldn't communicate her stance to the Board.

A blind acceptance and repetition of poorly-understood Twitter broadsides and mindless slogans is the rhetorical equivalent of canceling the sixes.

That makes us all look bad and we're gonna need you to stop saying it.

Nice to have money to spend.

A teacher in a neighboring district tells of a contracted consultant. She will come in 16 days, spend a time watching each math teacher, then will return on later days to tell them how to teach. The teachers who are being taught to teach will be given "release time" to meet with the consultant, meaning their classes will have a substitute.

This is not where the teacher needs help
and standing there with her is counter-productive.
You could hire her for 30 days for the salary that teacher's getting.

Why? Because they didn't meet their AYP quota ...not enough students were "proficient".

Which sounds like a system in need of some help until you realize what's going on. Over the five states that are part of this consortium, only 33% of the high school students are proficient. I find it hard to believe that all of those teachers across New England are all crappy teachers. Only 33% of 11th grade students, year after year, are able to reach proficiency while the same students as 8th graders ... somehow 75% or more scored proficient.

Did they suddenly get stupid? Maybe ... but doubtful that this would be a region-wide trend. Are the teachers lousy at this school or that one? Again, it's a region-wide trend. Also, the same students are doing much better on the reading and grammar tests.


If I gave a test that, year after year, only 30% could pass, what would your response be?

Could it be that the math tests are testing material the kids haven't taken yet? Welcome to the Common Core. Welcome to Pearson.

Get ready to fight for your public school, since the unspoken goal of all this testing is to find an excuse to shut down public schools and allow all that public money to shore up for-profit charters and to go to the very greedy pockets of the education industry's dank side: consultants.

And that consultant I told you about at the beginning? She's getting nearly $20,000.00 to come in 16 days and to tell experienced faculty how to teach.

Fill the Pail, then Light the Fire.

"Education is not the filling of a pail, it's the lighting of a fire." So says nearly everyone who runs professional development and teacher training schools, as if anyone could ever think critically about something without any facts to think about.  You can't have a decent conversation about the Civil War unless you have a knowledge of who fought it and why, when and where the battles took place, the rhetoric and speeches from some of the major players and a sense of the history that led up to it. Harper's Ferry touched off the fuse, but WHY? Why was the country ready to light on fire? Was it about slavery or states rights or federalism? Who fought on which side? What's with the Stars and Bars? Which side still traded with England?

If you don't know some of the facts, your opinions and viewpoints are worthless.

It's the same in math. If you can't factor trinomials, then there are scads of things that you can't do much thinking about. If you spend three minutes to do a fraction addition that the rest of the class does in seconds, then your understanding of probability is delayed, if not severely impacted. If you reach for a calculator to add ½ and ⅔, it makes it difficult for you to focus on what you really wanted to accomplish.

Imagine a class of Korean and Japanese kids (like one I had some years ago).  All had limited English skills.  They were always looking up words in the dictionary instead of memorizing, always working out the meaning word by word, and always resisting when we said "Just use English ... We know it's hard but it will pay off."  One day, we finished our math work early and one asked me about a Reading homework (instantly, the rest chimed in).  They were having trouble understanding what was going on.

I read the story quickly, two or three pages, a minute or so. It told of a man who lived in the woods ... his wife disappears ... detectives can't find evidence but they're sure husband killed her ... husband had a tremendous pile of split firewood ... no body in the wood pile, in the house, buried ... they realized it was warm and he didn't need the wood to heat the house ... why so much split wood?  Then a detective says "Aha, to work up an appetite."

None of the students got it.  They were so wrapped up in the definitions of words, in the structure of the sentences, and meaning of sentences that they couldn't put it all together at once and understand the whole. They didn't have enough facts and basic understanding to do any critical thinking. The "can't see the forest for the trees" analogy.

As an experiment, I grabbed a couple of weaker American students, dyslexics and generally slow readers ... they all got it instantly ... "Ewwww." I grabbed some European kids who had more years in country ... they all got it instantly ... "That's gross." The Asian kids were still stymied, even while other kids tried to explain without giving it all away.

Lighting that fire should be your goal, but the facts and knowledge are the only things you have for fuel.

And the original wasn't Yeats, it was Plutarch:

For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth. Plutarch , page 259

Not that the Internet has a clue:
UPDATE:
You can vote it up on Joanne Jacobs for least favorite edu-homily.

LAUSD, 10% Homework policy and Class Categories.

Seems okay to me that homework is limited to 10% of a student's grade. I think that's probably about right since I can never really be sure that the homework wasn't

• copied from a friend
• done by a parent
• cut-and-pasted from Internet sources.
• removed from the older brother's notebook from two years ago and handed back in! (Happened to the chemistry teacher this year - pretty damn funny.)

For me, there are two categories; "graded" and "practice".

"Practice" includes homework, classwork, some group projects, notebook checks and some ungraded quizzes that are up-front "Will not be graded - just for seeing your understanding." If it's done fairly completely, I give it 5 points, 3 if half-assed and 0 if not at all. Anything given out as a worksheet is placed on the Moodle and can be completed later for full credit. "It's practice!"

If students did it with help and it's not all individual work, it probably falls into this category. Since "practice" implies errors and improvement, this work is not graded for correctness.

"Graded" : quizzes, projects, tests. If you did this on your own and YOU have the understanding, then it fits into this category. I am not a fan of group grades. We can argue about that later.

How does this balance out?

The younger the grade and ability, the higher the practice portion of the grade. Weak 9th graders in pre-algebra get a 60% graded - 40% practice to encourage the notebooks, homework, classwork. It also gives me leeway for the IEP and 504 students who have so much of their work completed for them by the Resource Room Staff.


Thus, 10% for homework will work just fine.
For the AP seniors, there is no "practice" category. The grade is based on quizzes, labs, tests, and binder-questions. Daily homework is for practice and has no effect on the grade, positive or negative. (There are some graded problems for homework, but that's specified ahead).

It's high time they get some experience in deciding what and how much to do, and figuring how much they truly understand - now, while the education is free. Conversely, those who know what's going on can focus on their science or English on any particular day, or on their soccer game since I have a lot of soccer players in my AP calc.

My ultimate goal is for the student to leave the class prepared for what's next. If she passes Algebra I with an A, then she'll be fine in Algebra II. If they get a "A" in calc, then I expect they'll get an "A" in MA121 at RPI.

Code in a nutshell:

• I try to always be aware of the social promotion aspects of grading. It does no one any good, least of all the student, to pretend that he passed Algebra I so then he gets put into Algebra II. Don't pass him on "Effort" alone. It's not fair to him. 
• There's nothing wrong with repeating a math course.
• The assessment of their abilities should be reflected in the standardized test scores they earn: SAT, NECAP and Regents results. If my students are consistently doing poorly on standardized tests, yet get As and Bs, I need to consider whether and what to change. ME, not the school or the district, or any silly value-added measure.
• If the transcript says "Math" then I have freedom do work on whatever I feel is appropriate for each student. I can take a two-week detour into fractions and basic math if that is what they need. If the transcript will say CP Geometry, then I base the course and the grading on what that means in my school.
• I refuse to differentiate if it means I am not teaching what the transcript says I am teaching. Differentiation should happen by class - if he isn't capable of CP Geometry then he should switch into a class more appropriate. The one-room schoolhouse lump-them-all-into-one class and differentiate is utter bullshit and was only done last century out of necessity. Since it's no longer necessary, I don't do it. 
• I don't "pass" a misplaced student if it means he'll be more badly misplaced next year. By all means, I'll help him pass on his own but I won't pretend.

"I won't lie to you and I won't lie for you. Here's the straight dope."

Starting school at 8am or later ...

Okay, so this is a radical idea?  I've seen it work. It's quite pleasant for all involved.

Why not shift the day until later?

The later you start, the later you finish.  If there are limited sports fields, then the coaches need to be more creative in their planning and field rotations.  It creates some problems in late October and November when the light is fading and when playoffs and such have to begin at 3. After school schedules and later finish times mean lots of announcements that "XXX team is dismissed at 1:30", etc.

Students with after-school jobs lose work time. Buses and such need to change, which is occasionally a serious issue. At some VT schools, several towns cooperate with busing and so the high school schedule needs to mesh with that of the elementary schools. All Vermont high schools are affiliated with a Tech Center and send certain kids to it every day, so you have to mesh your bus schedule with that schedule, too.

So that's the bad news.  The good news is that the kids are awake for first period. The whole school is more relaxed. Tardies and absences go down. First period is no longer the yawning wasteland. The students have a better outlook on the day. It's not a panacea but it is like having a cafeteria that can actually cook decent food -- everyone feels better and the school runs better. (It's amazing what good food can do for a school.)


What's the big deal? Why can't kids just get up? What makes them so damn special?  My response is "Nothing."  I do, however, agree that for whatever the reason, my students don't really get going until 8:30 or so and the start time of 7:30 added to a bus for 60 minutes (yes, 60 minutes to go a total of 15 miles. It's very rural Vermont/New Hampshire. Don't ask.) plus 15 minutes to scrape themselves out of bed and shower (please?) means that they are seriously sleepy for first and second period.

Is it giving up? I don't think so. I think it's a matter of accepting reality and working with it, of accepting that the Calvinistic "up at the crack of dawn" thing isn't what teenagers have EVER done willingly, as a rule.

This should not be done as some magical cure-all for raising test scores, though it will probably affect things somewhat.  Since only 4 high schools in Vermont reached AYP last year, and yet we're still considered one of the best states in the country for education,  many places are willing to try anything.


What are the changes? Brattleboro Union High School will push its start time back an hour this fall, to 8:45 am.  The middle and high schools will now let out at 3:20 in the afternoon, pushing athletics back an hour.

Typical start times range from 7:20 a.m at Fall Mountain to 7:55 a.m. at Hinsdale. Bennington started at 7:10 for a couple of years but changed that. The local Catholic schools are typically 8a.m. starts and one of the four schools in Vermont that met AYP last year starts at 8:20 a.m. (It's a coincidence. Come on, people.)

I eagerly await the results.

Here's a pertinent site: schoolstarttime.org