It's
time for the annual round of teachers-in-summer blogs. These come in several
flavors: Ambitious (with a side helping of enrichment). Justification (a.k.a. "I
work harder than you know"). The traditional, obligatory Reading List for
Teachers. (This one blew me away--three books involving Nazis, Charles Murray
of Bell Curve fame, and...Daniel Pink?
) A Snarky Saga of the Last Days of '08-'09 (where someone almost gets punched
out, speaking of tense and irritable...). Plus two new cable TV shows for your
summer viewing pleasure, featuring garden-variety, nice-guy teachers. One manufactures
and sells high-test meth to build a nest egg for his family (since he's dying
of cancer), and the other sells his own substantially endowed body since he
doesn't make enough money teaching to keep his children happy and a roof over
his head.

Moral
of all the stories: Teaching is an undesirable low-prestige, low-salary,
high-stress job--and teachers can no longer publicly say the three best things
about teaching are June, July and August.

The
answer to all these trials seems clear to me. The traditional school calendar
is way past its expiration date, and should be abandoned. Its flaws are
well-known:  too much time off in the
summer, too much review needed in the fall--not enough well-used time, crammed
into too few days. The agrarian calendar represents a wildly inefficient use of
resources, and the folks who support it do so for reasons that have nothing to
do with education. All of the barriers to changing the calendar--busing,
sports, vacations, staffing, summer camps, cheap labor for summer businesses--
can be effectively addressed. 

My
personal preference would be a modular calendar, with four- to six-week
curricular units, offered flexibly, year-round--through both in-building residencies
and on-line. Students would be required to be "in school" a minimal
number of days (say, 180) but could select additional modules to attend school
200 or 220 days a year. Short vacations would be scheduled between modules. Students
could enter the system at multiple points in the year (September, January,
June) and finish when all the modules were successfully completed. Nobody would
"fail a grade," because a module could be re-taken if material wasn't
mastered. There are dozens of ways to improve the school calendar.

I
find it amazing--and get huffy and defensive--when I am reminded that a
significant chunk of the general public still thinks that teachers are working only
when there are students in front of them. The first step in changing that
perception is not going to be strongly worded blogs, however. It will be
banishing the lazy, crazy 10-week summer vacation.

A
few years ago, a local reporter interviewed me for a story on what teachers do
in summer. I ran through the usual agenda: planning, reading, looking at new
music, cleaning the percussion cabinet, taking a class, directing the community
band. They sent out a photographer for a photo. We had coffee on my deck--and
he persuaded me to stretch out in our backyard hammock with my own summer professional
reading. The photo (below) made the front page of the paper. 

And---I
got a call from a School Board member, that evening. He was dismayed that I
would agree to a photo suggesting that I was "laying around" all
summer, doing nothing. The Board wished another shot had been chosen. Perhaps a
glamorous pose of me cleaning out the spit-valves on the school-owned euphoniums?
 I declined to give him the brief lecture
on Urgent vs. Important that came to mind. But we have a long way to go before teaching
is a real profession in the public's mind.

Images: Livingston County Press-Argus; k.l.macke