Long schedule blocks encourage the integration of subjects like English and history, science and history, or mathematics and science. And the more personal approach has fostered a climate in which kids and teachers both take students' work habits more seriously. If they didn't disrupt the class, they would just get a 0 on their homework and nothing much else happened. Yet at the same time it's much more active. The teachers are no longer standing in front of neat rows and talking .
Kids initiate more work.
Jim Pitcher concurs. The weaker students still have difficulty, but because we're teaching differently they are getting much more of an education than they once did. In their parched and vulnerable desert landscape, these students have found ways to relate irrigation systems in Mesopotamia, for example, to the problems of greater Los Angeles. Student writing covers the walls. Each researches a community problem, then writes a proposal to alleviate it and works to help carry out the plan.