My primary school education was at a small rural church school. We had 3 classrooms for grades 1-8. I believe it was mostly broken into 1-2, 3-5, 6-8. The teac

My primary school education was at a small rural church school. We had 3 classrooms for grades 1-8. I believe it was mostly broken into 1-2, 3-5, 6-8. The teacher for one of the rooms would have to break up the day to teach separate sub-sets of the room their own lessons. This wound up leaving ample time to work solo and in small groups on assignments. I rarely had to make schoolwork into homework. While it was certainly a lot of work for the teacher to juggle, it also prevented them from trying to consume too much of the students time with active instruction. This is contrasted to the typical high school scenario where students are bounced between multiple rooms throughout the day where each teacher sees that they only have 40-60 minutes to cram their lesson through. I don't think I can emphasize enough how important it was to be to be able to work on my 8th grade algebra homework on a couch cushion in the back of the room while other kids were doing their science lesson. Obviously the shared room model is directly akin to modern open office layouts which are chaotic and can be confusing even for well leveled people. I think my point is that kids should have plenty of unstructured time to do the vast majority (if not all) of their work at school.