Attention span? Anyone who cannot pay attention while focusing on a single subject for an hour and a half will never be able to read a book! College classes lasting 45 minutes! A Tuesday/ Thursday class meeting has to go for 1.5 hours each time in order to produce a three-credit-hour course. A teacher who cannot hold his students' attention for the 1.5 hour block either doesn't know enough about what s/he's teaching or has students whose lifestyles are so ruled by seconds'-long sound and visual bytes that you know they were silenced early on by placing their swing-o-matics in front of a television set. A mind's attention span can be increased with exercise just like any body part. Flabby bodies are produced by eating too much and exercising too little. Flabby minds are produced by silly time-fillers and busywork while reading too little and too lightly. In the factory model for schools, the current prognosis for students is uniformity. Soon all our students will seem flabby-minded on the inside and be dressed all alike on the outside. Do we want everyone who graduates from public school to be Gammas and Epsilons? The block schedule is absolutely the best for students and teachers who _work_ at learning. It's certainly worth the .5% of the budget to allow it at the high school level. You can take away the A.P. designation for my course, but don't mess with what I teach. I refuse to teach an A.P. course without sufficient time to do it. Go ahead and assign me freshmen but don't expect me to be a "team member" pushing for FCAT performance. My educational goals are not set by George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. I never went out to be a member of his team. I never voted for him to be my captain. Why should we allow a nearly stupid, narrow-minded, stubborn man determine what happens in our neighborhood classrooms? Repeal the Act and quit grading schools as if they were factories competing with each other to produce the most uniform product! Pinch your pennies elsewhere. Stop trying to save money by focusing on the wrong things. Pay decent salaries to teachers and watch Collier County classrooms fill up with brilliant scholars and students with strong, lean, focused attention spans. Such a move is good for America. dwyerj1 (anonymous) at 10:09 a.m. on November 10, 2007 (Suggest removal)