1. THESE ARE NOT SEMINAR COURSES. This is not designed to shove as many students into a classroom as possible. Properly conducted, each class should contain the following three elements of learning: Textbook, Application, Discussion*.
2. These class schedules are currently being used in both public and private schools using the exact same length of day, week, and year as we are. Furthermore, the students get the same or more learning time because this schedule eliminates the number of times students have to change class rooms per day.
3. Think of it this way: your child spends at least 14 years in the car observing how to drive. They spend weeks studying the material to pass the written exam for their learners permit. But despite how much they think they know, they discover the challenges of applying everything they have learned when actually being behind the wheel.  You can apply this to a more technical scenario: Students spend years in medical school, but they aren’t licensed as doctors or nurses until they do internships/residencies where they take what they have learned in the class room and apply it. What the fewer and longer class system does is allow more actual application time of lessons learned for a better mastery of material.  This is especially important in the stem base curriculum.

*Some parents have expressed concern that the longer class periods might challenging their students’ attention span. This is why the integrated learning process keeps things engaging enough to hold every student’s attention.

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We moved to Lexington in 2003 when my daughter was 4 years old, a year before she started kindergarten. The biggest reason I chose Lexington was the superior school system. We thoroughly enjoyed her elementary school years and we found her teachers engaging, creative, and supportive. When my daughter entered middle school, we saw problems arise. She would come home explaining, ‘The teacher did not have enough time to teach the material in class,’ or ‘not enough time to explain the homework assignment for the night’. Life only got worse in 8th grade as I came to realize I had two students: my MCAS student was an over performer with many of her scores in the 80-90th percentile, meanwhile my transcript student had a C average. She was struggling with allocating time for homework and studying for tests in 6 different subjects every night. She was taking time away from homework in subjects she was strong in (English, History, Science) to put into tests in subjects she was less comfortable with (Math). The net result was the missing homework assignments would drop her grades by 1-2 letters. As the school years went on, there were more and more gaps between material she was understanding because there wasn’t enough time to fill those gaps, so the grades in all of her classes kept falling.

Meanwhile I had friends in other states whose schools had adopted the fewer, longer class system, and friends in Lexington that had moved their students to private schools with similar schedules. All of them were reporting calmer, happier students and overall home life. In January of her 8th grade year, we made the leap; she applied to and was accepted to a private school. Six weeks into the program, my C student became an A student. She began to enjoy subjects she had thought she had hated or just needed to “get through” to satisfy graduation requirements. Time at home returned to laughs and jokes instead of tears and excuses.

 

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