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The Absurd Structure of High School
I have 20 new students entering my classroom every hour. The frenzied pace is failing everyone.
Consider this schedule: At 8 a.m. you arrive at work. Immediately you are busy with a quick problem needing to be solved. You sit and get to it, but only for about three minutes. You break your focus to stop and receive instruction for the next half hour, before getting to work on another task. There may be a bit of discussion, but you are on task and dedicated.
Just before 9 a.m., you stop again, move to a new office, and start a new task. Your previous hour was spent on accounting, applying math to a problem, then training in more advanced math, then more application. This next hour will be focused on writing. Again, you spend several minutes on a short orienting task, then listen to a lecture, then engage in practice and knowledge transfer. Just before the hour ends, you switch offices again and repeat the entire process, except now the focus is studying your company’s history.
It’s now 11 a.m. You break for a half-hour lunch, then go to your company’s lab for an hour. You repeat the workflow process from this morning, but now you also must perform an experiment. As this hour ends, you again change rooms, change focus, change task, change environment, change peers.
Each of these hourlong periods leaves you with work to do outside the office: four or five math problems, 20 pages of reading, a paragraph to write, 10 new vocabulary words to memorize. Your workday technically ends at 3 p.m., but most days you have some kind of event after work.
You want to stay healthy, but you spend most days sitting the entire time. You walk fewer than 3,000 steps a day on average, so after work you may take up a sport—not a game, usually, but more practice and drill.
We are married to a system that has not been properly re-evaluated for 21st-century capabilities and capacities.
You do all of this every day, Monday through Friday. On weekends you often have work that wasn’t finished during the week. The managers who oversee your various hourly commitments don’t really communicate with each other…
