Should school days be shorter? Attempt #2

Section 1: To start off by explaining the disadvantages of shorter school days. * Possibility of an extended year. All over the country, schools have a certain amount of instructional hours that each teacher is required to meet and each student is required to attend. If the school days were shorter, they'd have less time to meet these requirements, therefore the school years would have to be longer. So students would have less, but more. * Diminished instruction quality. .. When a student enters Middle School and/or High School, they start taking science classes and every now and then they do labs in those classes. With a shortened day, teachers have less instructional time, which then means less lab time and less time for the students to either learn anything, perform the lab or do so correctly. It would be like this for similar classes too. Without the time they already have, teachers wouldn't be able to teach anything and students wouldn't be able to learn anything. * Hurts the teachers. Shortening the school days would hurt the teacher just as much as the students, just for different reasons. Throughout each school year, both student and teacher gain something. The student gains knowledge and the teacher gains a paycheck. But with shorter school days, teachers would be getting less hours, which means less money they'll get paid. Lets do some math for a bit. Shall we? - The average salary for a teacher in the U. S. ranges between $37,540 - $56,316 with 180 school days. Now for this "experiment" if you will, I will use the maximum average salary. Okay, so to start off, let's assume that each teacher works 9 hours a school day, 5 days a week. This is not taking into consideration overtime (i. e. after school activities), or snow days. This means that each teacher works approximately 1,620 hours each school year. So, they'd make around $34.76 per hour. That's $312.84 a paycheck, not counting for taxes. Eventually they all add up and the teachers get their paychecks at the end of the school year. Usually anyway. That seems pretty good, seeing as a lot of us usually think that teaching doesn't really pay well. But that thought can become a reality, if we make the school days shorter. Their hourly pay may decrease and they salary would definitely decrease. By how much is dependent on how many hours one plans to take off the school days. So in the end, it's doing more harm than good. Section 2: I was planning on discussing another topic for this section, but since my opponent decided to ignore the debate's schedule and went ahead and made an argument in the first round, I will rebut one of their points. The point in question? Hitting a student with a stick. This can have many disadvantages, mostly mental. As an abused child, I know what kind of effects physical and mental beatings can have on someone. First off, it degrades the child. It makes them feel like they'll never be able to do anything right and that they're worthless. This eventually leads to depression, which then leads to them falling out from society and then possibly suicide. Also, depending on the severity of that depression, the student in question may start falling behind in class which may prompt more beatings or the student to just flat out going to that class or school altogether. It would hurt the child's education. That's probably why it's illegal to hit children in some states. And there are a ton more reasons. I would like to ask my opponent and the readers to please read through the very last link at the end of this round, it will shed some more light on the disadvantages of hitting a child. I would have loved to delve deeper, but I'm afraid that I'm out of time. Again, I would like to thank my opponent for accepting this debate and I look forward to reading their arguments. . http://education.seattlepi.com... . https://www.google.com... . https://www.google.com... . https://answers.yahoo.com...