education does not have to go slow

Some people wonder how schools like this can accelerate the learning process. No offense to teachers as we write the following–most will probably agree with us. Take the middle school I used to work at. Each student had 5 periods of academic classes, 1 period of PE and one period of classes like, art, computers, music etc. Although PE and other classes are very important, let us just look at the 5 academic classes. Each class was about 40 minutes. Some of that time was for attendance, student discipline, housekeeping, bathroom, working with multiple students,etc. Although I personally think on average only about 20 minutes of each class was solid learning for a student (some teaching a student already knows but the teacher has to review for the other students), lets go with 30 minutes per class times 5 classes. That means a student is actually only learning the academics for 150 minutes a day (2 1/2 hours). If it is the 20 minutes which I personally think is closer to the truth that would be only 100 minutes a day or one hour and 40 minutes. In individual paced programs it is real easy to double and triple that learning time in a day to get the learning and the diploma even faster. Home school parents know this idea well.