Fighting the Furlough Mentality
March 15, 2010
-Mark A. Carey, M.A.
Few adults are happy about the Furlough Friday situation, and most of us feel relatively helpless about what to do about it. As parents though, there is much you can do to fend off the damage that this political football is inflicting.
Just what are the losses? Ironically, it is not the shortened instructional time itself that is so damaging. There is an awful lot of time in school that doesn’t necessarily translate to ideal learning, and there is much that can happen outside of school that can equal or surpass the educational value of a particular day of class. As a classroom teacher, I was expected to maintain a strict “excused absences only” line. That was hard for me to do, though, when a boy’s father was able to arrange a special three-day fishing weekend or a girl had the opportunity to spend a Monday with a rarely visiting grandmother. What could I have offered in school that day that would be more valuable? This is a delicate position, I realize. Continuity of curriculum, effects on planning and tracking of work for students and teachers, and more suffer when students are absent. Moreover, all too often, we find students missing school for frivolous reasons. It is necessary and important for parents to insist on regular school attendance, and exceptions such as those I mentioned need to be rare.
“Furlough Fridays” cause more damage than a few missed days of school. The greater harm is coming from the entire phenomenon. “Furlough Fridays” is rapidly becoming a cultural institution, one that many of us—especially many students—are enjoying at some level. It’s a great feeling to have the laundry and shopping done before Saturday arrives, and I feel healthier and more relaxed having that extra chunk of time for both tasks and pleasures. What’s so bad about that? The problem with having “Furlough Fridays” is that it is just too appealing to those who would rather not be at work or school. The very existence of the phrase sets this in our minds as an expectation to look forward to and maybe even count on. True, I have often enjoyed the luxury of three-day weekends in the past few years, but they are a reward I have worked toward over decades of a career; I have “earned” them, to the extent that I can afford them. Boys and girls have not yet earned that luxury, and they need the discipline of knowing that a job, for most, is something that goes on five days a week—or more. Right now, they are learning that you only have to be on task part time. They don’t have the foresight to understand what they are missing out on, which is the horsepower and persistence needed for a strong work ethic.
We talk about the goal of “lifetime learning,” but in some classrooms that does not seem to apply on weekends—of whatever length. Creative, productive, long-term assignments are routine in some classrooms, and some teachers are now trying their best to cram more into the shortened week. Other teachers, perhaps in apathy or frustration or both, opt for none. Many students now report that there is not even homework on Thursday nights, because “it’s a long weekend.”
While you may feel powerless to resolve the politics that fuel Furlough Fridays, you can help make something good of a bad thing. Parents can turn to their sons and daughters and make it clear that children have a full-time job, which is the pursuit of learning. They cannot “let schooling get in the way of education.” The expectation that children be engaged in learning should not be limited to the school setting. As a parent, you have a right to require this of your child, and you are doing something in their best interest when you do. Depending on your child, you can set goals for Friday and weekend work that are neither difficult to plan nor impossible to manage. It can be as simple as having some required reading time each week, or it can be more complex and interactive according to the student’s capacity for independent work and your ability to be a part of the process. The most important thing is to set a constructive goal with your child for the Friday and for the weekend and see that the goal is met. It might be as straightforward as writing letters to grandparents, building a detailed plastic scale model of a car or plane, learning to use a new piece of software or internet resource, or organizing the family photos on the computer into albums based on themes. It could be that the student works with a tutor on an academic weakness or on taking a strong skill and interest further. It may even be that the student takes on some sort of limited employment.
Depending on the sort of expectations and behaviors that are already established in your household, setting and executing constructive goals for personal enrichment and learning may be quite easy or it may be something of a struggle. Some parents will find this a pleasure and it will unfold with ease. Some may find that providing additional incentives is helpful; perhaps a student can earn a special weekend privilege for exemplary effort. Others may find it is necessary to institute some negative consequences such as confiscation of a cell phone until a task is completed. A combination may be needed. Certainly, the larger goal is to create expectations and opportunities for student successes, and those successes will breed others.
Hopefully, Furlough Fridays will soon come to an end, but until they do and then even after, Furlough Friday can be a springboard for families to address the importance of taking education into our own hands each day and making the best of opportunities that we can discover or create.
-Mark A. Carey, M.A. is a Learning Specialist at Kaulele Education Services in Kilauea, providing academic tutoring and diagnostic educational evaluation for students of all ages since 1975. www.kaulele.com
