The news has come that we will have a six-day week.  I’ll assume that my city and school officials are doing their best and that this situation was unavoidable.

In a school where we’re doing our best to turn the work over to the students this is tough.  Whatever routines we build over a few days get erased.  Whatever momentum we have for the work dissipates.   Whatever culture is built needs to be rebuilt.  This is the nature of working with teenagers — long weekends make for difficult Mondays — but to not have a full week of school  until the sixth week is going to make it hard for students to take full ownership over their work.

It’s the difference between a college lecture when you arrive and settle into a row with your notebook knowing that whatever interactions you’ll have will be in your own head or in the notes you take versus the feeling you get when you walk into a small seminar and know that you’re going to have to do the reading and that you’ll not be able to stand by while class occurs.   We want our school to feel like the latter as much as possible.    The better analogy becomes the feeling when little kids continually start games over and declare “no, this time, this is real.”

It’s not insurmountable but it is frustrating.