Obama: Make the School Year Longer

If President Obama had any hope of recovering his approval rating among teens, he probably just lost it when he announced support for making children go to school longer each day and each year. The reasoning given is that schoolchildren in other developed nations have longer school years, and are learning more than Americans.

"Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas," the president said earlier this year. "Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom."

"Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

This is not a new idea. When I was in high school, they were talking about year-round schooling and experimenting with alternative school schedules. Very few showed any concrete results. Then again, it does seem strange that we're still observing school schedules based on the corn harvest in parts of the country where you can't find a corn stalk.

Two Different Kinds of Schedules

I've known for sometime that an ill-timed meeting or interruption could throw my schedule off for an hour or more. As a programmer, I tend to work in blocks of time. It seemed that short of turning off e-mail and IM and hoping for no phone calls, I didn't have a good solution. Enter a great article about the difference between a "Maker's Schedule" and a "Manager's Schedule". A manager's schedule is broken into 1 hour segments. Meeting with someone is just a matter of finding a free spot. A maker's schedule is broken into tasks that can talk half a day or even a day. The solution? Plan meetings at the end of work day.