I know this is typical for the US so this is more for US people to respond to. I wouldn’t say that it is the best system for work, just wondering about the disconnect.
Because even I don’t want to work 9-5.
(Also, when are teachers supposed to do things like grade work, or kids to have extracurricular activities, 9-5 is draining, add in music or sports and there’s nothing left)
This was my first thought. Teachers definitely need time to assess outside of class time. I would think that assessment or grading would happen while they aren’t teaching. There should be a system where teachers grade outside of teaching time or during “homework/study hall” time. You would teach math for 6 hours and grade math for 2 or some breakdown that makes sense. I don’t want to make teachers work anymore than they already do. The current system doesn’t seem to respect them either way.
Who do you propose else does it? Teachers know their students and can learn from tests etc and help them do better. additionally to the original argument, it’s not just grading that teachers have to do as well, also lesson/course planning, setup for lessons (eg slideshow/lab/printing). There’s just a lot for teachers to do outside of the classroom.
It isn’t even just grading work. In my high school classroom I have students ranging from a second grade reading level to post grad. Every reading, worksheet, science lab, project needs to have accommodations and modifications written in to encompass that. That takes time.
Or creating a new lesson. Making a new lesson for a 50 minute period takes at least an hour.
Clearly you and I participated in very different school experiences. In highschool, I got on my bus each day at 7:30 and got back off the bus at 16:00. If you subtract the 30 minute lunch period, that adds up to almost exactly 8 hours each day.
Factoring in the 2 hours of homework that was regularly assigned, I actually have substantially more free-time as a working 9-5 adult (my school did not have “study hall” time). A young me would have done unspeakable things for a chance at abolishing homework!
There are compelling reasons send them 9-5
There are also compelling reasons not to
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Teachers spend a non-trivial amount of time post class working on previous assignments, future assignments, setting up tests coordinating with other teachers and staff. If they start all this at 5, they’re stuck at the office until very late.
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Busses/kids on the road before rush hour
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Extra-curricular activities are better off earlier than later, don’t want clubs running into diner time.
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better chance of getting home before dark in winter at Northern latitudes
- We shouldn’t be forcing our children to spend the majority of their waking lives chained to a desk doing menial work mixed with some valuable education and instead allow them to actually be kids and be outside doing kid things.
I’m a private teacher and I see so many kids who are like, I am in school from 8-3:30, then from 3:50-5 I’m in softball, then I’m in a study group from 5:30-7. I go to bed at 9.
Kids aren’t allowed to be kids much of the time anymore. Most everything seems to be in the duality of either “Glued to their devices” or “Endless cycle of extracurricular and studying”
I absolutely refused to do homework back in the day. I had one math teacher that took your median grade and used that as the final grade. I would calculate to the assignment what it took to get an a, and do that much homework between arriving to class and the time she checked homework in.
I would always rush to complete my assignments early in other classes do any homework that I could get done before class change. I always aced my tests.
I think the worst was when the teacher would assign us to read ahead of chapter for the next days lesson. Yeah so you want me to be miserable tonight, and double bored tomorrow.
I also hated that the teachers never communicated. They would unintentionally group-assign hours of workload in non-GT classes.
For #4, with current school hours, you either go to school in darkness or you go home in darkness. That’s just reality for those who live further north.
What if all the honework in the future is done online and multiple choice… if its a written asignment it can be graded by an AI. Bada bing teachers have not much more to complain about. If you are a teacher and are still complaining about having to grade homework, its probably because your administration is stuck in 2007.
A better argument would be, is homework worth it? Once AI has significantly advanced to be trustworthy enough to grade, it will be trustworthy enough to do the homework.
Want to be forward facing? How long before AI replaces teachers? What if classes were solely presented as video feeds. At any point you can raise your hand, It would stop the video feed. You ask the AI question. It formulates a response and then tests you to make sure that you understand the answer before moving on.
Imagine getting the equivalent of one-on-one tutoring in every subject.
What if instead of milestone tests the AI just follows along and makes sure you understand what’s going on? What if the next day it does a quick recap on the previous days lesson and asks you a couple of questions to make sure you get it?
What happens when each individual learns at their own pace and goes as fast or as slow as they need to. What happens when you can just walk away from a lesson and come back later?
Edit: I just cleaned up some text from voice dictation.
There are a couple of flaws with this. I spend a great deal of time structuring lessons to get students working with each other. I have met, and taught, too many people who have said that the only reason they stuck out through high school was the relationships they developed with thier peers and staff. We’ve seen what happens when students only do solo computer work, and it isn’t pretty.
AI doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, let alone what somebody else doesn’t know.
“Understanding” is just something that AI can’t do. It doesn’t know what your words mean, or what it’s own word mean.
AI isn’t good enough to grade written responses. If your referring to chat gtp and the like, they meant to be factual. Also online multiple choice homework can suck awfully depending on the course; physics comes to mind in this scenario since it requires an answer with precision and matching units to mark the homework as correct and that can make it really difficult to resolve and even if the teacher sets it up for partial credit if you get it right after attempts, if you can’t figure it out it is a 0. That physics homeaork destroyed and consumed my entire life lol
Working 9-to-5 is miserable. It only helps if the wolk you’re doing is interesting.
For a child, school is usually not ‘interesting’. Children shouldn’t be subjected to misery.
P.s. Props to you for saying you’re in the US, not just assuming it.
Because kids are too young to drink.
