Being a principal is not something I would love to do as a full time job, but it is definitely something I would like to do for a week.

We all know, whether we like it or not, that school is very important. Therefore, taking it away is not a wise decision. Neither is making a school week four days instead of five or making a school day two hours. Here are a couple things I would do as a school principal.

Firstly, I would shift the school day forward one and a half hours. In our school (International School of Dakar), our school day starts at 8:30am and ends at 3:20pm, if you don’t have after school activities. I know that there are schools out there that start much earlier and/or last longer but I am speaking about my school and my school only. This pushing of the school day would make school start at 10am and end at 4:50pm. This would be a good idea because people need more sleep. Many kids around the world are deprived of sleep and pushing the school day up would solve many of these problems. Also, the brain doesn’t fully wake up and start to be attentive until around 10:30am. This would also solve the problem of lack of attentiveness, requiring less homework.

This would also create some problems such as when after school activities would take place. This could be solved with a bit of rescheduling. For example, if volleyball training takes place from 4pm to 6pm, we could transfer it to 7:45am to 9:45am. This would help us physically wake up in the morning and the weather would be cooler, especially since in Dakar, afternoons can reach 37 degrees Celsius during our volleyball season.

Secondly, I would reduce homework hours from 2-3 hours a night to 1 hour a night: this means each subject gives us around 15 minutes of homework a day. I would do this because studies show that Finland’s student’s get better grades overall and perform better than students from average schools around the world. This is due to a number of factors such as shorter school days but one major factor is the fact that they don’t get any homework. I agree that homework can be good when given in the right amounts. I think that 15 minutes of homework from each subject is the perfect balance, and will give us extra time to socialize, have some free time and rest. At the moment, most, if not all student in our high school can only pick one or two at most out of the three.

So there’s that. These are a couple of the things that I would like to do if I were principal for a week. I hope you enjoyed reading this lengthy post. Feel free to leave comments and your blog URLs for me to check out. Thanks 🙂

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