*Exceedingly* few high school students have such problems. There are ways to deal with those few. IOW, a red herring.
Your principal and the entire faculty, in fact, were morons. Maybe they were just ahead of their time. It also must have been a very small high school.
Now I remember. Starting around 7th grade, my schools did have bathrooms. No tubs, just communal showers. It was compulsory to bathe together twice a week.
Our school had a Western Union clock system governed by a grandfather clock in the office. Occasionally we'd see classroom clocks jump because the principal was adjusting the grandfather clock.
I believed in punctuality, being neither late nor early. I'd generally reach my desk 10 seconds before the bell. All we had at home was a 3" electric clock on the stove. That couldn't be read precisely, so I relied on my internal clock.
Sometimes on a Monday morning I'd be 10 seconds late instead of 10 seconds early. I couldn't reset my internal clock on the principal's whim, so I'd be 10 seconds late every day. By Friday, teachers would be complaining about my continuing presence in detention. The principal would fix his clock and Monday the school would be back in sync with me.
He could have saved detention teachers a lot of unpleasantness if he'd checked with me or the Naval Observatory before tampering with the grandfather clock.
That sounds like a lot too long to keep students at a desk. Half hour to 45 mins would make more sense. Need to get up and walk around. I don't think this sounds practical.
That's about the same size as our HS. I can't believe any principal would be so stupid as to believe classrooms could be emptied, people jam halls, all mixing on their way to the next class, and file into the next class in 3 minutes, particularly when the clocks don't work (ours almost always did - Simplex and IBM, same clocks). Add to that the "need" for bathroom passes, and he must have been someone current administrations could look up to.
An hour is about all one can expect for an attention span. My son had classes that went two hours but they were really a combination of two (English and history, or some the like). They were combined classes with about twice the size, with two teachers. They had plenty of breaks and changes of topics during the classes.
Add in the current ADD "epidemic" and it can't work.
He was a liberal loon. You couldn't get from one end of the campus to the other in three minutes, with the crowded hallways. I averaged 4:15 from science class, to electronics, then 4:00 back to the new wing for the next class.
This was an IBM clock system, but parts of it were over 50 years old. The oldest part of the school was built in the 1800s.
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Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.
Stormin Mormon wrote, on Sat, 01 Nov 2014 08:59:41 -0400:
As a matter of fact, the teacher (who is brand new to teaching) asked me for advice on how to keep the kids *engaged* for the entire hour and forty five minutes.
She, knowing I'm good at googling, asked me to find some math games, and I also gave her a big bag of extra Halloween chocolate I had bought, which she is going to use to "reward" the kids when she catches them being good.
She also knows my strong feeling that math isn't taught correctly, which is a very long story, but the short of it is that math needs to be taught from the practical problem standpoint.
For example, I suggested she think from the perspective of two kids throwing rocks into a lake. What happens, mathematically. Or two kids trying to kick a soccer ball into a net, while clearing the height of the other kids. Things like that might keep the kids engaged, if, I suggested, she *start* a problem that the kids might be interested in, and then, working backwards, she bring in the math, and, in the end, the equation and graphs (and, ug, proofs).
I told her to think of all the math that applies to that problem (or any problem involving two kids trying to figure something out that two kids would want to figure out), and to teach that way. She told me that is a *lot* of work, and I did not disagree.
So, that might take years.
In the meantime, there are always the math games we found, which might help to exercise the kids' bodies, every 30 minutes, for a five-minute game.
I did help her create some worksheets, as she was unfamiliar with manipulating Microsoft Office to make graphs.
I ended up making tables, and it took a while to figure out how to make the boxes the same with and length, and then how to add the x and y axis, as I couldn't get the tables to "group" with the drawn axis even myself.
In the end, I gave up on Microsoft Word simply because I couldn't get the non-groupable items to move together, as a single unit, when text was changed.
So, I opted for PowerPoint, instead of Word, and made a few templates for her for her worksheets. She put the kids in groups, and they moved the chairs together (forcing them to stand up) and they worked together.
Yeah! What was I supposed to do in a 50-minute lecture when my attention span was under a minute? The fact that lectures were endless repetition showed that teachers knew we were unable to pay attention. They were putting us in a position where we had to sit still and pretend to pay attention all day long.
Each teacher would proudly tell us how many hours we were expected to spend on daily homework for that class. Add it up, and if you did nothing but attend classes and do your homework, there might be time for
4 hours' sleep at night.
It sure seemed abusive to me, but this article says teachers really are that stupid.
That's seriously incredible. What a major learning moment. And to think, schools over the whole great nation do that to kids every school day? Time for the peasants to start a number two pencil revolt. You have nothing to lose but your desks in rows!
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