New Schedule
It all began as a couple or rumors. “You heard..?” No I would say delicately, afraid to say something I wasn’t suppose to. “The schedule is changing to like eight classes.” I stood there in awe,why would the school do such a thing? I asked myself.
Everything is going alright, there’s no evident need for a change. Would this mean that all classes would now be year long? And most importantly what’s going to happen to tutorial!? All these questions continuously snaked around my head as I now searched for my own answers. I received my answer a couple days later in homeroom, and so did every student school. But till this day, there’s some who agree with this new ordeal and just as many who don’t. But we have to remember that after so many meeting and discussions the school only wants what’s best for us, as they continuously look for ways to provide us with more opportunities and more benefits.
Besides the usual things that many are complaining about like the shortened tutorial block, I was amazed to actually still see tutorial still implemented on my schedule, because I honestly thought it was going to be thrown out. Cutting tutorial would have actually added 19 free minutes to our schedule, that could have been divided for the six classes, causing each class to be about 3 minutes and some seconds longer. This would have been a benefit to any teacher, but I believe the school took into account how we’d feel about such a decision and didn’t take away our beloved tutorial. Thank you. On the serious note the new schedule doe have its benefits.
Class are just a little bit shorter so kids don’t have to stay in one class for 65-75 or even 90 minute for some schools. Long classes can be very tiring for students,imagine having to spend lets say about 25% of your day in AP Statistics. Total headache. But a 50 minute class is not only better, length wise teachers are still able to keep the attention of their students without having the, drift off into space repeatedly. Studies show that disabled students are shown to be able to focus better because classes are shorter, this is a great benefit for those who need this short time to be more attentive.
But the best thing about shorter classes is students have a better memory of classroom routines, such as remembering which materials to bring to class like the book covers we always tend to forget around the first week of school. Most importantly the due dates of class assignments are easier to remember. This is very important because we’ve all been subject to forgetting one or two assignments till we woke up in the morning and had to come to school earnestly like “I totally forgot that we had an assignment” When you well know that-that card has been played several times before you. As well as there are many good things about this new schedule, like its pros the new schedule also has its cons. The first disadvantage is the amount of homework every student is now going to be facing.
Though we have been promised that its not every day we’ll have 6 homework assignments, there will be such days where we willhave to face such mountains, and for the kids taking taking AP and Honors classes there climb will be even steeper. The next disadvantage is for kids who may miss a day of school due to maybe a flu or something of that sort. Missing even a day in this new schedule can result in you missing “a lot of days” one or even two days missed could result in a lot of make up work. The other problem about this new schedule is the fast pace, though the classes may not be so long the short time that is provided for the teachers to teach on forces them to teach more quickly at a faster pace. For classes like foreign language it would be very difficult for the teachers to teach their students in such a short period of time because, foreign language teachers need the extra time to teach their students.
Let’s remember that they’re trying to teach their students a new language. There’s about as many good things in this new schedule as there are bad things. Anything new takes time before it’s process is admired or even taken into consideration. It’s like someone saying that they hate school but they’ve never been to school before. We don’t want to be ignorant as students,rather we want to accept new changes and go with what the heads of the school system want for us, because truly do want what’s best for us and what’s best for the school as a whole.
