The New York Times shared the above terrifying statistic today.

We already know the impact that out-of-school factors have on student achievement (see The Best Places To Learn What Impact A Teacher (& Outside Factors) Have On Student Achievement).

Pile on this additional economic stress, and the fact that this means many of our high school students will be taking either over-or-under the table jobs to help support their families during this crisis, and we know that nobody is going to be doing very well.

We need to keep that in mind, and recognized that we must provide social emotional support (see The Best Resources For Learning About Teens & Stress) and realize that we have to strip down what we expect to teach (see CRITICAL QUESTION FOR US TEACHERS: WHAT AREN’T WE GOING TO COVER THIS YEAR).

I’m recommending to my colleagues that, at most, each high school school class expect no more than five hours of student work each week – INCLUDING any synchronous class time.

I’m open to an argument saying that is even too much, but I can’t imagine that anybody is going to convince me that it should be more.

What do you think?