Teachers in elementary schools send their classes off to other parts of the building at least once each day for lunch and recess. The teachers sit in a quiet room and eat, meet with other teachers, complete tasks in peace, and make assessments. Sometimes, they do it more than once, while the students have music, gym, computer lab, art, science, or foreign language lessons. One school that I toured drove this point home: Students were with their home room teacher just 2-3 hours each day. The rest of the day was allocated to other rooms for enrichment classes, lunch, and 2 recesses. In
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