Doesn’t it? The average human lives for around 2,240,543,592 seconds, which a mind-bogginly large number. The average UK student spend 117,000 seconds per week in school, or 56,160,000 seconds over an education from 5 to 16 years old. Huge numbers that lack meaning, much like the phrase being bandied about in school ‘Every Second Counts.’
It’s a lovely sounding statement though isn’t it? “Trust your kids to us, because we make every second count.” What people mean is that the five hours1 of the day will be productive, working and thinking hard, but this is a nonsense. Think about when you do a task, any task, and about how often you get distracted. It is simply unsistainable to maintain concentration for that long. Okay, so students get to move from one classroom to another, so that’s a few minutes where they’re not being bombarded with facts and things they need to remember, but we’re still expecting students to concentrate for far too long.
Top of the world…
The average person can concentrate for around 15-20 minutes on any given task. Lessons are meant to be structured so that there is a variety of tasks, but I still think lessons are far too long, and ‘every second counts’ is leading to a burnout amongst students and staff.
Try it. Find something you haven’t done ever before, and then watch some videos or read some webpages about it. How long was it before you switched to Facebook, or videos of pandas falling out of things2? Learning stuff is hard, mainting your concentration and effort at something is harder.
Schools are absolutely meant to be about learning, but the frenetic pace of EVERY lesson expected now is just not sustainable. It is not that long ago that students went out on trips regulalry. Now though, every trip has to have some sort of educational value that can be linked to the curriculum.
Sometimes, the trip itself can be a learning experience, and we seem to have forgotten that in the race to improve 4+ and 5+ outcomes3.
Years ago, we ran a day trip to France. We loaded up the whole of our year 7 cohort onto several buses and drove to the North Coast of France for the day. Several things happened on that trip that have lived with me since. First was when we were on the ferry, in the middle of the crossing, no land in sight and surrounded by water, one of our students said ‘When are we getting on the ferry?’.
When we got to France, different groups got to do different things. One of our more boisterous female students got off the bus at a goat farm, wearing high heels. Now, they’d all been told they were going to a farm, so why she wasn’t in trainers will forever remain a mystery, but as soon as the air hit her, she said ‘Oh god, what’s that smell?’
I don’t know, maybe the countryside?
Now, given she’d been on a bus with loads of boys for the last few hours, surely the pungent smell of a working farm would have been preferrable?
I ran a trip to Alton Towers each summer for years and years4, before it got canned due to no ‘educational benefit’. We would leave school at 6 a.m., go straight to Alton Towers, spend the day, then go to a Youth Hostel for the night then return to the theme park for the second day. We’d get back to Devon at around 10 p.m., so it was a full on two day trip. The students I took were from a rural community. Many of them had never left Devon before this trip. Some of them had never spent a night away from home. Very, very few of them had seen the diversity we encountered within thirty seconds of arriving. But sure, yeah, no educational benefit.
This is hidden learning – the unquantifiable stuff that schools do to help students become functioning members of society. Stuff like knowing that subjecting a bus full of young people and cranky adults to hardcore dance anthems before anyone has had their first cup of tea of the day is not really a good idea and is a great way to get your brand new bluetooth speaker confiscated.
Tip for any teachers doing a long trip like this – treat yourself to some expensive noise cancelling headphones5. It’s well worth it!
For years, I resisted the urge to go on the school ski trip as it was during February half term. I caved last year, and went to Northern Italy with about forty students. It was brilliant, and I now regret not going sooner in my career. The only downside is the thirty-odd hour coach trip, but, hey noise-cancelling headphones!
The hotel treated us to a three course meal every night when we were done skiing. One lad took one look at the food and pushed his plate away. every single night. Didn’t matter what the food was, he wasn’t having it. after dinner, he would always manage to produce a packet of pringles – one of the big ones – and eat that instead. Once you pop, you can’t stop I guess. I asked him what was up with the food, and he said he didn’t like it. Every day. I didn’t once see him even try a mouthful. He did get to see the mountains and learn to ski though, so maybe next time he’ll be brave with the food6. I think about him often – could he have got more out of the trip? Yes. Could we have forced him to eat? No, not really. That sort of thing is frowned upon. He had food every day. Did he experience a foreign culture that he almost certainly wouldn’t have done if not for the trip? Absolutely.
On the first day skiing, I fell near the bottom of the slope, within sight of where we were meeting the students for lunch. My knee clicked, pain shot up my leg and I thought ‘oh-oh’. I’d been at the back of the group, so I was on my own, everyone else long gone. The first person to me was around five years old, and, despite being Italian, said in perfect English, ‘Are you ok?’. Despite being in pain, I obvioulsy said I was fine – I am British, goddamit – and he skiied off having already returned my ski to me.
Our students were all fifteen or sixteen and they were amazed at the talented skiing from really young kids. Another life lesson – there’s always someone with a different experience to you.
And that’s the win. A non-educational trip teaching students about the big old world out there. We should be doing more of this, not less. Sometimes grades are not the only thing that schools should offer.
It’s half term now, so a break next week. Rest up. Switch your laptop off and for the love of God, do not open your work emails.
Until next time.
FOOTNOTES
- A lot of schools operate a five lesson day. I am not counting break and lunchtime here, nor even tutor time. ↩︎
- Like this one! ↩︎
- And of course, we should be trying to improve outcomes – it would be stupid to suggest otherwise. ↩︎
- When we driving from Alton Towers to the Hostel, one of the kids said ‘why do all the hedges have stone in them?’. Um, they’d be walls? ↩︎
- Mine are Bose, in case anyone from there reads this and they fancy sponsoring the blog… ↩︎
- Lunch was fine, as it was usually pizza and chips. ↩︎
David Watkins 
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