Local politics, the county, and the world, as viewed by Tammy Maygra
Tammy's views are her own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Bill Eagle, his pastor, Tammy's neighbors, Earl Fisher, Betsy Johnson, Joe Corsiglia, President Obama, Tony Hyde, Pat Robertson, Debi Corsiglia's dog, or Claudia Eagle's Cats. This Tammy's Take (with the exception of this disclaimer) is not paid for or written by, or reviewed by anyone but Tammy and she won't take crap off of anyone.

A number of states have decided to add time to our children's school days and have even decide to add the length of the school year as well. I happen to agree with this idea. There are no good reasons why our kids cannot spend a regular day in the classroom. We need to have our kids competitive in math and science. In the past several decades US kids have fallen further behind other world nations in academic skills. Parents along with teachers need to expect greater results from our kids in all areas of education.

For example I do not believe that it is correct to allow a child to misspell words and give them a pass if the word is close to the correct spelling. I do not believe that it is ok to allow a kid's penmanship to be unreadable. I think that we as a society have been a part of the decline in our kids learning. I do believe that we can reverse this trend by simply not allowing our kids to slide by with minimum effort.

I also think that the school day should be from 8 a.m. to 3:30 for all kids. The little guys can lay their heads down on the desk and take a nap for an hour during the day and the teacher can grade papers or get the lessons ready. There is no reason a kid goes to high school and has "free" periods for half the day. If you have a study hall then that time needs to be used studying and not horsing around or leaving campus. We all are to blame for the problems with our kids. We have given them too much and they have phones, and computers. All of these things are ok with limits but many of us let our kids spend hours on these instead of making them read and practice their math skills and writing. Or even going outside and playing. Instead we have made our kids not only mentally lazy buy physically lazy as well.

All of these problems can easily be corrected with just some good old common sense. I have all the faith in the world that our kids can be the leaders in the world.