Just checking around the recent activities for LHS and see that the LAUSD schedule for the academic year 2010-2011 will begin on August 16th. That semester ends on December 17, 2010 with 77 "instructional days," according to the school calendar approved by the School Board.
The next semester will begin on January 10, 2011 and end on June 7, 2011, with 98 "instructional days."
The new school year is shortened from last year as a budget cutting measure. A semester was normally 20 weeks. 5 days a week would make a semester total out as 100 days, so you can see the second semester is still a respectable length but the first semester looks like its 23 days short of the regular semester length, 4 weeks and 3 days shorter. On the bright side of things, if you have a teacher or class that you don't really like, if that happens in the fall semester you have only 77 days to go through instead of 98 if it was the spring semester.
Things have changed a lot since I was a student at LHS and there have been a few changes, too, since I was teaching there. Most alumni have the idea that school now is like it was when they left and that's not quite the case. Homerooms or Roll Calls were part of the norm when I was there in the 60s. You recall that you were assigned to a particular room and teacher for Homeroom that was usually right before the Nutrition break.
In Jr. High, homeroom was segregated by gender and was the first class of the day at Nightingale when we started in the 7th grade. And they changed Jr. High to Middle School, made the first year to be 6th graders and you left at the end of 8th grade regardless, as I found out, whether you learned anything or not. This was commonly known as social promotion.
But the homeroom of old at Lincoln put about 20 students of both sexes together for the entire duration of high school. The benefits of this setup was that you had 15 or 20 minutes to hear the daily bulletin to know what was going on, get some questions asked on a low or no-threat level when it came to ego, and you got to know you homeroom members and see them, for better or worse, each day that you went to school. Stories were traded and updates on what's happening at LHS were talked about as well as talking about things with the teacher who was going through the high school years with you to 12th grade.
My homeroom teacher was Mrs. Ruth Daniels and she was from the old school but nice to us in her special way. We also had some of the student teachers assigned to her stick around for homeroom. One was a young teacher from Hungary who was in the revolution there and told us about the experiences from time to time. I don't think that we were able to appreciate the significance of the struggles he talked about since we were in the U.S. and had no way to know all about the lives of people in other countries like we have now.
Well, that's then and this is now. I think it was a good part of school and maybe might have had some positive impact on the dropout situation had it been kept. At least there was one "class" that you were not going to "fail" and you could talk with others for a while about what was happening and you don't have that "no-pressure" class now, no respite from whatever the day held for students.
That was taken out, and when I taught there already 5 years ago, your 2nd period class had some time added on for roll taking and some "reading" to be done for the first 15 minutes. Each semester that particular group of students changed, and each semester there was a new combination of students; there was no continuity of any sort with the student grouping or the teacher. This arrangement, I suppose, was to improve things but I don't see that either the behavior or the student academic performance went in any positive direction that I think an old style homeroom arrangement would have helped promote.
While I was teaching at Lincoln, there was so much "F"-word and "B"-word that was in the air at any given time outside of class that it was very noticeable upon first arriving at Lincoln. It was just like that at about ever other school in the district as I was told by other fellow teacher/students at the teacher courses we had to take during the semesters. I don't see this "non-academic language" coindition was anything that the school administration ever cared about fixing when I was there. A school-wide "behavior plan" that a "review" or accreditation team created after visiting LHS during my first year there never got off the ground. I'd say that the word "appalled" would describe their reaction to the school's profanity-rich environment. But it never really seemed that the administration cared about that during my time there.
In fact, I never heard one word again after the "Team" made the report after studying and visiting classes for a week. You could see that their ears burned with the student chatter that was heavily laced with profanity flowing freely through the air during lunch breaks and passing periods. I walked in the same halls near them and heard a lot of what we had, to some extent, grown used to. They clearly appeared to notice the bad language from some of their reactions that I observed during their first day's visit.
We as teachers, at least outside of our own classrooms, had quickly become numbed to these words but newcomers usually had this area as their first shocking observation.
LHS was like this with the dress code, too. It never was enforced unless it reached some level of a penal code violation, I guess. The administration really was not useful in this area from a teacher's point of view. A lot of promises and there it ended. I think that discipline, applied evenly, fairly and consistently, could have done a lot to make the place a lot better for students and adults alike, but that was never grasped by the on-site powers that be- and I doubt that's a condition changed much, even with the change of principals. I mean, what was this lack of limits doing for getting them used to conforming with life "outside" school where your language and manner of dress may be subject to "expectations" and being hired or not can depend on such basic choices? No, LHS did no favors for students by allowing this nearly complete "freedom" it you want to call it that.
And it was every teacher for himself in handling the "in class" situation. We, or more accurately, my students, always made progress, although it was far from perfection, but the classes were very good, almost profanity-free during class hours by the second semester. And then it all started again after summer vacation.
Well, school is changing and the Public Choice and SLCs have made what you and I remember even more distinct and distant from the current conditions. I think the SLCs are another bunch of straws that are being grabbed at in desperation for some way to improve performance. But how can you have continuity of contact with a specifically grouped faculty- a touted feature of the SLC plan- when there is so much turnover in the faculty?
And equally questionable is the idea that every student can pick his or her special area of interest, often associated with a career path, to pursue for their full high school time? Nothing stays the same, especially with teenagers.
These are students, just teenagers, and they constantly are changing their minds as they feel the need to. They learn new things that influence them and your 9th grader may not have the same thoughts by the time he or she is getting to the 11th grade, or even earlier. Often, many never get to the 12th grade and this is not the way that I think will do much just because a class group is smaller. You may have even a worse time if you find that you don't seem to click with one or more teachers and this program is designed to make your academic fishbowl of teachers much smaller.
Well, when there are some significant trends that someone can show me and can connect any changes to these theories, let me know.
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