Year-Round Complaints : Brief Vacation Fails to Help Students Enjoy Their New Schedule

The Class of ‘97--Ann Howitt’s sixth-graders at Sylmar Elementary School--just returned from their free October.

They went to Disneyland and grandma’s house. They camped around a fire and Nintendo sets. They pretended autumn was summer.

But the 22 youngsters in Room 22 are back in school, and they don’t like it. They weren’t crazy about this new year-round school experiment in the sultry days of summer, when they struggled through long division without air conditioning. And, now back to reality after six weeks vacation, nothing has changed.

“We didn’t have enough time off,” said Mike Alpuche, 11. “We were playing, and now we’ve forgotten everything.”

Added Lidia Holden, 11: “I had forgotten when we had to go back until yesterday. My mom had to remind me.”

Mike’s classmates quickly chimed in with their complaints:

The weather wasn’t warm enough.

Their friends were in school.

Summer programs at parks and pools had ended.

And their families couldn’t take long trips.

Things were supposed to be different. After opposing the new schedule in July, the youngsters were going to come around a few months later. Six weeks of playtime would do that. It didn’t work out that way for Howitt’s class.

“Although I think some of them are happy to be back,” she said, “I just don’t think they would admit it in front of their friends. It’s not cool.”

Parents would not admit it, either.

“I think it’s still the pits,” said Candy Duty, whose son, Cameron, is a student in Howitt’s class. “My husband only gets three weeks vacation, and we like the heat. We’re summer-type people. We like to go to the beach and the lake. We couldn’t do that.”

Debbie Alpuche, Mike’s mother, had hoped to introduce him to scuba-diving classes, “but they only had them during the summer.”

Even the teacher, who has adopted a wait-and-see attitude from the start, couldn’t take total advantage of her time off. Normally, Howitt takes education classes and fixes her Northridge home. She is married with three children.

“You just don’t have the total sense of release that you do in the summer,” said Howitt, who has taught elementary school for 16 years, the past five in Sylmar. “You know you have to start planning pretty soon.”

For Howitt too, year-round school is still a foreign concept. As her vacation neared its end, Howitt began preparing for the next few months. “This will be very different. I’ve never had a long break with a class and then had them back again.”

On Nov. 13, they came back. Howitt spent the first few hours plodding through reading exercises, trying to make the transition as smooth as possible. The class seemed attentive, though a bit lethargic. After assigning homework, Howitt was greeted with the expected response.

“Homework? Tonight?” shouted one student, and the class agreed, anticipating a one-day reprieve from normal school life.

“Definitely homework tonight,” Howitt quickly responded, asserting control before anarchy could spread. “You might as well start.”

During classes in the summer, Howitt went slowly with the academics. Six pages of literature took 35 minutes instead of the usual 20; she typically assigned 20 or 25 math problems instead of an entire textbook page of about 35. By the end of the first period--July 6 to Sept. 28--though, Howitt felt the students had grasped a significant portion. The question now is: How much will they retain? Proponents of year-round school had argued that shorter breaks would help students remember what they had learned.

“It’s too early to tell,” she said. “I’ll know better in a few weeks.”

But Howitt admitted that the new format does allow her to plan her agenda more efficiently. “I’m planning in blocks that begin and conclude,” she said. “Before, I’d have a looser lesson plan, and I’d think that we could eventually get to everything, but you don’t get to everything. Now, I can better make sure we get to certain areas before the breaks.”

Before the recess, she taught long division in math and map and globe skills in social studies. From now till Christmas break--they will be off from Dec. 20 through Jan. 2--Howitt will teach decimals in math and early civilizations in social studies.

Howitt also believes that the more frequent breaks might go a long way toward curing teacher burnout. “I’m starting to look forward to going back,” she said two weeks before returning to school.

In August, Howitt said her students had not yet matured into typical sixth-graders, for whom “the social scene becomes more important than the academic scene, and their hormones go bananas.” Instead, they were fairly well-behaved, unaffected by peer pressure. Last week, there were signs that the maturation process had begun:

Alpuche sported a slightly punk haircut.

Lidia Holden and Irma Martinez scouted the playground for cute guys.

And Justin Palmer, assigned to write about a person he admires, selected Playboy’s Miss November.

“They’re beginning to become teens,” Howitt said.

BACKGROUND

Beginning last summer, 23 San Fernando Valley schools started year-round instruction, affecting thousands of youngsters. To chronicle how the new schedule affects one group of youngsters, Valley View is following Ann Howitt’s sixth-grade class at Sylmar Elementary School through its first year-round schedule.

In the first installment, which ran in August, students and parents complained about the lack of air-conditioning in 100-degree classrooms. Because of the heat, the teacher was forced to go slower to help students pay attention. In the second report, the class has just returned from its first six-week vacation.