School Year Extension

This will be much harder than I expected, but what else could I expect from this site. Now I shall go right into two points you made, one arguing mine and one of your arguments. When I was talking about the 7 weeks then one or two off, and when you said that summer is good for being with family and other hobbies they may take up. Well having this one or two weeks off between quarters can give them a week of vacation, or two weeks of doing whatever they want. It is very essential in both of these forms so the kids have time to themselves, to visit their friends, and even going on vacation in any weather of the year. Say the kids wanted to go to New England in the fall to see the leaves change color, well they have to take a few days or a week to see this, but if they had this week or two to themselves in the school year they wouldn't miss any type of homework or class time. This would be very effective for families to even go to Hawaii in the winter without missing school as well, or go meet family members in a different state as well. You say having longer school years mean nothing, but again this is not true. Everyone knows that students aren't always on the same page as the others. Some may get straight A's, B's, or lower so having more time equals more time that the teachers are able to help those lower grade students. This also helps the higher level students learn about their favorite subjects more, such as how in History books WWII may come later and the students may not even be able to cover it. Having even 10 days such as Finland can help the student and even the teachers in class and help America raise their overall skills and maybe we can be as highly rated as Finland or S. Korea. You say we already have the opportunity to attend a trade school or university, but as in Russia it stands only 10 years of school are necessary, and as we should already know when 16 the student may drop out but in Russia they can attend the trade school or University so people like Mark or Steve could be here in America with the education to do more if they wanted. And also, how does me saying summer camps for foreign languages help you? It is another form of education that may or may not be used by the school system. If all schools have every single language I would like to study that wouldn't be a problem but most camps we hear about are sports camps, which are fun, but not in everyone's best interests. We all know knowing another language is key in many jobs so why not offer these camps so kids may learn and study the languages over the summer so they can remember them into the next school year, whether it be for one month or the entire summer it would help us learn these languages even more and be more aware of other cultures by knowing their language. I agree with your stand on Standardized Tests saying that they don't measure intelligence that greatly, as I have taken a PSAT, and I saw that it was easy actually. But I would have liked to see other subjects on it as some students may not be good in math as they are in history. You say literacy is the most important, which I would have to agree with, but you can't just be literate and expect to go off in life and be perfect. Now onto, whose going to pay for it. Well now this is important and this is where I draw the line. The government is pretty stupid, sure they make good decisions from time to time but they really need to invest on natural sources of fuel instead of oil. If we could do this we wouldn't be spending millions or billions in the war on terror, which is really a last ditch effort to get oil in the Middle East, we should keep our industries in America so we can make money for us and stop buying material from foreign countries. If we are as smart as we think we are we really wouldn't have this 14 TRILLION dollar debt now would we. I shall leave your post on Private School since those are important for some kids and I have no quarrel on your issue with that. I shall now point out some more reasons why this is important to increase the school year. Is our free time really in our benefit? As in the news there was a Teen Rob either this week or last week. If it was not for their FREE TIME would that have happened, possibly. But it is safe to say if we but more focus on education would all of those teens have been robbing that store, I say not. Free time is necessary but it is also has many cons. It is good in creativity but some people take creativity to a very bad extreme, such as making bombs at their house or robbing some stores. Now more school may fix this but to destroy the problem everywhere is a long shot. Why do kids in the U.S. hate school? Now every kid does not hate school, but I have to say at least 50% or more do and that is well over too much. Some students hate certain subjects and would like to have the ability to skip them and learn what they like but that is why we get more electives later in school. A main reason is that kids may stay up late and not want to be there or they may just hate learning in all manner of its being but to say all those kids will be set for life because they are going to be smart like Mark or Steve is like saying five is greater than six. You may get someone to bite for it once in awhile but it won't happen all the time. Kids today aren't disciplined enough and think they can get away with not going because they can strip a car and put it back together in two hours or that they are good in sports but without a proper education and the ones willingness to learn it won't happen. Now increasing the school year won't help this problem but it is one to address. You can't just say having 180 days will be better for the kids who do learn in the 200 or 240 days of school will help our country as a whole. Why is America to cheap to fund school anyways? If we say the future is key to America why are we waging war and spending all this money on our military instead of our school system. It should be a known fact that if our schools are better funded then our kids will be better equipped to face today's problems. If our government funded our schools like they do the military how much could our schools accomplish? A tremendous amount more than we are now so don't go and say we can't afford it because in all entirety we could afford it and still have money left over. My source shows you how much money military spends, pay close attention to fact number 4, it shows an interesting fact about how much teachers we could pay if it weren't for our military power. For those of you who won't look, we lost 11 billion dollars in the Iraq war, that could pay 220,000 teachers, so don't even say we can't afford it. That was only in 2007. http://www.businessinsider.com...