PRO:

By Maryam Khatoon

Going through the motions of school, homework, eating and sleeping is a daily standard for SCHS students. With the addition of maintaining and juggling home life, jobs and extracurriculars, it’s nearly impossible for the average student to keep up with six to seven different classes a day.

Classes at SCHS should consist of block schedules everyday, or at least four days a week. This will allow students enough time to settle in a class and soak up the lesson.

Fifty minutes per class multiplied by the average six classes per day equals 300 minutes of knowledge students are expected to process and store each day, leaving little room to breathe.

Fifty minutes is also an insufficient amount of time for teachers to thoroughly delve into their lessons.

The millions of thoughts swirling through students’ minds as they rush from class to class leads to holes in understanding. Each student’s different abilities and speeds of soaking up information leads some students to feel left behind and lost. The longer class periods will allow students time to process and review the information taught to them in class.

Understandably, sitting through longer classes may leave students feeling fatigued. However, this can be easily solved with teachers allowing students to take quick breaks in between while still maintaining  focus.

Students often end up not focusing on the current class mainly due to the hyper speed of classes, endless amounts of homework and after school commitments. These class assignments can pile up to be a theoretical six hours of homework on top of the eight hours of school.

The social pressures along with one’s level of confidence and competence begins to hinder. The dilemma for most students is picking two of three choices: school, sleep and a social life. Many attempt to juggle all with varying degrees of success.

Having a fewer number of classes per day will allow students to slow their hyper-active minds enough to focus and learn the information they are being taught in class.

CON:

By Miranda Hunt

Many schools across the country have opted for daily block schedule, fitting up to 120-minute classes of three to four periods every single day, which is unproductive and inefficient. SCHS’s schedule is such that we have days where we go to all of our classes for shorter periods, and for good reason.

Because SCHS has a block schedule on Wednesday and Thursday, we get a little taste of what students at other schools experience. But for a lot of students, those two days are the longest of the school week. The longer class times don’t bode well for students who have trouble focusing, and it may be hard for them to absorb the necessary information to be successful on those days.

A typical block schedule has alternating  days in between classes, giving students more time to forget what they’ve learned. The time taken out of the next class to review the previous lesson could be better spent expanding on the day’s lesson, or learning new material.

Additionally, absences could be detrimental. Because block classes run longer and students are getting more instruction, a student’s absence is equivalent to almost two regular classes, making it harder for the student to catch up.

Some say that block schedule gives students more time to comprehend lessons, but this is incorrect because it leaves students who have missed classes struggling to catch up. Though the dread of missing large amounts of class time is a good motivator to be at school everyday, students who are sick and still coming to school aren’t doing anyone any favors.

Although a block schedule would give students extra time to do homework and teachers extra time for in-class instruction, the long classes, lack of continuity and the amount of material one would be missing by being absent are enough to turn one away from the idea of a block schedule.