Comment & Debate
Jeanette Wat. “Extended Year-Round Schooling, Extended Success”. Naperville, Illinois – Meet John and Jane. Both are high school students; John is from Naperville, Illinois, and Jane is from Shanghai, China. Each school day throughout the year, John always feels stressed with a crunched learning time and accumulating loads of homework. He must either relinquish in-depth learning or cut sleeping time in order to accommodate the workload. When June approaches, John is first excited, as the long-awaited summer break finally arrives, and he can rest. But his brief excitement soon disintegrates into boredom by the too long summer break. He is overjoyed when school finally starts again after the long break, only to discover that he has forgotten much of the material he learned before the break. John is a student of a traditional school that provides 9 months of education and 10 weeks to 3 months of summer break every year.
Jane is in a very different situation. Not only is she not stressed, she even feels relaxed because her learning time is not crunched. In fact, she has many more school days than John – thus, she always has enough time to go in-depth in learning which both stimulates her and builds her a rich and solid knowledge base. Unlike the exhausted John, she does not need to cut sleep because she has enough time to learn and do homework. Above all, she does not have a long summer break to forget what she has learned. Jane is from an extended year-round school that provides continuous education all year long.