Bravo to you for this!
I am a retired teacher, having taught for 34 years (1969-2003) in urban public schools.
During my last ten years of teaching, in something that started as being totally unrelated to teaching, I became a Toastmaster to work on my public speaking skills outside of the classroom. It didn't take too long for me to realize the specific area of need and interest that I had: speaking to parents about how they could help their children to become successful.
Towards that end, I did the math and found the remarkable small amount of time when children are awake and in school: just under 15% of their waking hours during any given year!
[This is how I derived that:
The school year in California 180 days.
Each school day 360 minutes (6 hours)
lunch 50 minutes
recess 20 minutes
transitions (entering class in the morning, going to and coming from lunch and recess, dismissal) 30 minutes
Our six hours (360 minutes) of school has now been decreased to 260 minutes.
Multiply that by 180 school days and you get 46,800 minutes, or 780 hours per year.
Total hours per year 8,760 hours
Subtract hours spent sleeping 3,467.5 hours (average of 9.5 hours per night)
Remaining hours per year 5,292.5 hours
The 780 hours of school are 14.73% of your child’s waking hours during a year. Let’s round that off to 15%.
Did you think that your child spent more than 15% of her waking hours in school? If her teacher(s) are responsible only for that small portion of time, who is taking care of the other 85%? This is you - the parents!
If a store were advertising that it was having a sale, with 15% off its usual prices, would you be impressed by the savings? Probably not, because you know how small 15% really is.]
In case you are interested, I wrote this piece and published it on Medium:
Wishing you the best. Thanks for getting me revved up this morning!
