School has only been out a week and already kids are bored.

How do I know?

My kids are so bored they leave the bathroom door open while pooping just to keep arguing with siblings that happen to walk by.

While they are pooping.

I do not have any boys, aside from my nephew, but he is with his mother in Seattle this weekend.

Earlier this morning I enjoyed the pleasant calm as I sat on the couch drinking coffee waiting for the three sleeping minions camped out on the floor to wake up.

The 11 year old woke up looked at me and farted.

These children have lost their minds from too much pool and sun time. Their little minds have become a mush of spinner obsession and fart jokes.

The madness has to end.

Summer break over! Everyone out of the pool and on the bus!

Well, sure maybe they deserve more than a week. In Japan, summer break is only five weeks. Much of that time is spent doing sports or activities. Unlike here in the United States of lazy children where maybe a quarter of students participate, in Japan participation is about 100%.

Here we spend money on other things so it costs families out of pocket to participate.

It's fun to watch, as a kid growing up doing cultural exchanges I would get to see the massive kendo practices. Kids only usually did one thing every year, baseball, swimming, whatever, but hey focused on one thing.

There are no janitors at Japanese schools, all the kids participate together at the end of each day to clean the classrooms and rest of the building.

High school is done way differently too, which I think American kids would actually benefit from if we were to adopt similar practices.

To go to high school they have to take a placement exam. What kind of high school they go to is determined by their results of the exam.

Here we test kids and stress them out with no personal gain at the end. That doesn't seem fair to me.

What if we trained kids to learn about the types of things they have a natural aptitude for? In Florida for example, they have curriculum-specific schools that focus on math or engineering or journalism and multimedia, etc. Kids got into those schools not based on any test, but through random lottery with a certain percentage of neighborhood kids close to the school.

My point is that here we try a variety of different approaches, where others have better refined system that it would benefit us to pick and choose the best to emulate. We have a society in which both parents work now and the old school hours were created for an agricultural-based society.

Wouldn't it be great of kids had school to keep them out of trouble with our modern society's busy year-round schedule?

My kids are bored to tears now, what if they had all those school year sports during the summer instead?

Anything other than letting them sit for ten weeks, or whatever summer vacation is now.

Kids aren't working summer jobs anymore, those jobs are held by struggling adults these days.

Time to change the way we do things and keeping our kids busy and learning year round seems like a great place to start.

What do you think?

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