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With recent school closings, increased activity fees, teacher layoffs and crowded classrooms, I was stunned to hear that certain school officials and political figures were proposing to spend precious funds to extend the school year by five weeks.

If that money is somehow available in these stingy times, I ask those officials to please put it to more effective use and cut class sizes and hire back those teachers. Give back the time, resources and professional support those teachers need to give their students individual attention and to focus on their students' different learning styles and interests.

Allow our kids, teachers and parents quality time to connect, to know each other, to learn together. Encourage teachers to use their particular expertise and experience to lead students on an in-depth educational journey, deemphasizing the current standardized test-driven curriculum in which students receive a cursory introduction to a hundred subjects, reduced to work-sheet summaries.

Students already work hard in school and often even harder after school during the school year, their free time virtually eliminated due to homework, jobs and multiple scheduled activities. Use these nine months of hard work to teach our children how to think and learn, how to investigate the world around them and how to explore where their natural curiosity leads them.

Leave them the summer months to restore their underused imaginations and creative abilities. They may learn five weeks worth of desk-knowledge in a single day, contemplating first-hand the spectrum of a rainbow or the microcosm of an anthill.

Nine months of quality education should effectively introduce kids to the skills and concepts they need to learn, and three months of quality leisure should give them opportunity to observe these concepts at work in the real world.

"Hey," my 6-year-old son exclaimed on a summer day at the lake, "the ripples on the water make a pattern of circles. We learned about patterns and circles in school. Cool!"

NINA BOHROD, Shoreview

http://www.startribune.com/dynamic/mobile_story.php?story=5787128