Rigid Flexibility?

Why One Hour a Week is Plenty

by Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

Modern conventional middle or high school programs have trained many of us to think that students must meet five full days a week to obtain a “good” education. Few evaluate how ridiculous this assertion is so let’s count the cost. Students spend on average from 120 to 180 hours—per subject, per year—sitting at a desk as the standard normal way to acquire any single body of knowledge such as basic chemistry, history, Spanish, or geometry. Home educators are told by most states that their child needs 120 to 150 hours of "seat time" to count a course as a credit (that’s for an academic year of one subject). Many states require a minimum of 180 days of attendance in school. On the traditional schedule, courses meet for five days a week for fifty minutes. To make things more dismal, these hours are now rarely garnished by things like woodworking, auto repair, art, music, home-economics, or even good literature as books have been condensed to short stories. Such topics have been phased out in most places.

Cubicle Life?

Is there something scientific about these numbers and calculations about “seat time”? Have education scientists determined that the average student truly benefits from 120+ hours of sitting to master a topic? Not at all. Worse still, most classes demand additional hours at home to finish assigned work so let’s add another 80 hours over the course of a year. What can an average person learn and accomplish in 200 hours per year?
Those that believe there’s some logic behind requiring 120-200 hours per subject per year often demand even more. Disappointing results on standardized academic tests in public schools urge pleas for more funding, longer school days, more special programs, more special aids, plus lots more homework. Most districts comply and try to convince taxpayers that adding more to the school day is the only solution. Not only do modern students sit far longer in classes than at any time in history but conventionally schooled students rarely have time for part time jobs, serious hobbies, volunteer work, family life, or much else, for that matter. Long days parked in physical classrooms and long to-do lists notwithstanding, disappointing exam results persist and worsen while a generation of young people languish dangerously.

Old School

A century ago, around 11% of high school aged students attended any form of continuing education and they only did so for about half to a third of the year. A school day consisted of a few focused hours in the morning and a few more in the afternoon. Educators would normally set students to their tasks and then go elsewhere to work with younger students who needed more feedback on basic skills mastery. High school students enjoyed enough autonomy that they could work through material at a pace that they influenced while time demands allowed them to remain essential to their family (and local) economy with full or part-time work.
Most adults today couldn’t get close to passing the 8th grade exams of a century ago. 14-year-olds demonstrated better mastery of subjects and better intellectual engagement in a wide variety of topics compared to today’s PhD students. Great grandpa who “just” had an 8th grade education was likely far better read and better prepared in math, history, and science than most youth today. Great-grandpa and great-grandma would be stunned by how long 15–18-year-olds are expected to sit at a desk while they accrue no clear benefits nor make any contributions elsewhere when, for all human history before now, this same age group would have already been undertaking adult responsibilities at near adult skill levels.  
Veteran home educators know there’s no logical reason why anyone needs to sit in school for 8 hours daily and still have more classwork to do at night. If you don’t educate your students at home, put yourself in that classroom seat. Imagine how much better you might function if, after getting your assigned tasks done for your day, you could move to the next project to free up your Friday, read a book, play an instrument, paint, play a sport, make some cookies, work on a 4H project, or simply be done with responsibilities the minute you have finished your own work. Sure, you might be a procrastinator by nature, but it wouldn’t take you long to improve your time management and ambition level, all to your benefit, because your reward for doing so was relative freedom each day to finish up and move on.
Cubicle workers know it is difficult to find motivation to do much out of the ordinary when stuck at a desk no matter how productive they’ve been. At least they have a paycheck for their efforts but why apply a cubicle mentality to education and expect better results? Our 16-year-olds are being asked to imagine their hypothetical “paycheck” which won’t arrive until age 18 or 22 or even later.

Why We Picked ONE Hour Classes

We began offering semester courses at The Lukeion Project in 2006 starting with Latin. Our goal from the start was to teach the way we wish we had been taught. Because we weren’t government funded nor sanctioned (whatever that means), people asked us why we wouldn’t just make all classes fun and easy! Why should we have high expectations and assign things like papers or the National Greek Exam?
At The Lukeion Project we wanted to be as effective as possible at our jobs because our business model was built on students successfully moving up to the next level of difficulty over a stretch of years rather than taking just one fun class. Why even offer Latin 4 if we were going to do a poor job at Latin 1? The answer was not going to be found in duplicating methods that were failing in schools.
Our long-time teaching experiences at the university level and as home educators had already demonstrated to us how a certain rigid flexibility was the best model. The bulk of new material and a bit of review can easily be covered in a single one-hour meeting weekly. Doing more than 60 minutes in a session is difficult for even adults. All new material for the week is covered in 60 minutes. Students who need more time to master a subject are provided abundant resources to help demonstrate and review key concepts. Meanwhile students who are quick to grasp material can finish the work and move on. All work is turned in during windows of time with a set-in-stone schedule.
Rather than cutting corners (as those who are accustomed to the 150-hours-in-a-desk might think), we have found a highly effective approach that demonstrably brings students to their desired levels of mastery with sufficient autonomy as reward. This develops executive function, time management, and maturation.
If subject matter seems easy to a student during a certain week, she can finish quickly with free time as an incentive. If the material is more challenging, she can take all four days in the assignment window to complete the task while reviewing the recording, working a few self-tutorials, using flashcards, and playing the review games. Both types of students move along at the same pace, but resources are available to support extra coverage as needed. Staying on a schedule keeps a student motivated to keep focus and momentum. One’s “seat hours” might be 30 for the academic year (one-hour live online each week) but actual involvement in subject mastery –review, quizzes, writing projects, discussion boards, translations, etc.)—might be anywhere from 90 to 200 hours over an academic year, as the student needs. Since our first full semester course in 2006, this system has worked beautifully.    
Repetitive review tasks after a concept is fully mastered is drudgery and feels like trying to remain focused while staring at products on an assembly line. Students who need more time to learn a subject will not have all the same needs as everyone else. One concept might make sense quickly, but other skills need extra attention and time to sink in. This is why, for many people, conventional school can feel like running in the wrong foot race all the time. Students at all levels and approaches benefit when they are given more autonomy.
In a single one-hour live session at The Lukeion Project, we move ahead into new material and usually have students engage in that material or review in a lively way. The online classroom allows all students to participate, not just the fastest and smartest, because everyone has a chance to type in answers. Technology makes it possible to record each session so students can review whatever flew by too quickly. The one-hour meeting pushes the limit slightly on the extent of standard human focus, but we keep sessions lively and illustrated to help cover the material while engaging brains.
One student needs a couple of hours. Another one needs five or six. At the end of the week, everyone has had the chance to engage the material with the enticement of having control of one’s own time. Home educated students do very well in this system. Conventionally schooled students will struggle more at first because they are not accustomed to enjoying any benefit from finishing their work after achieving competence. Given the chance, they always prefer autonomy and liberty. They catch on quickly.
How do we know our methods are successful? We have both our Latin and Greek students take national exams, not for our sake but to demonstrate to others that they are making excellent progress in ways that are recognized by “the powers that be.” 95% to 97% of Lukeion language students earn honors. In AP Latin and AP Lit., students enjoy a 100% pass rate and 50% earn a score of 5. Many of our classes are taught on par with college level courses yet our students usually excel while still having time to accomplish the other tasks that make life worth living.