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Five minutes: A small sacrifice for happiness
Published: Friday, November 9, 2007 - 7:05pm
We at Uni have a lot of advantages over other schools. We get regular exercise in an excellent PE program. We don't have nasty cafeteria food. We have amazing teachers and quality classes that actually might prepare us for college.
Possibly my favorite things are the free periods during which we can roam free throughout the school or around an entire college campus, instead of study hall, where you just sit "quietly" at a desk. How boring.
Aside from the insane homework and difficult classes, we have it pretty good at Uni. Except there's one thing that really bothers me.
We don't get out of school until almost 4 p.m. We have really extremely long school days. A lot of other schools get out at 2:30 or 3, and they don't even have near as much homework as we do.
Can you imagine how much better our lives would all be if we got out at 3? We would actually be able to go home, do all of our insane homework, and still have time to relax.
Yeah, I know, amazing concept, right?
I think that a simple way to make this a reality is to make class periods 45 minutes long. We don't need all 50 minutes. Most of the time teachers end up saying, five minutes before the bell, "OK, well, I'm not going to start on anything new, so just talk for five minutes."
My proposed schedule:
- 1st: 8-8:45
- 2nd: 8:50-9:35
- 3rd: 9:40-10:25
- 4th: 10:30-11:15
- lunch: 11:15-11:55
- 5th: 12-12:45
- 6th: 12:50-1:35
- 7th: 1:40-2:25
- 8th: 2:30-3:15
Wouldn't that be amazing? If we did adopt this schedule, school would be dismissed at 3:15. Sports practices and play rehearsals could start at 3:30. Everyone would get to go home earlier. We'd have happier teachers, happier students, and just a happier environment in general.
It would be especially nice for tech week for plays. They could start at 4 or 4:15, and then I could actually be home before 10. We'd all get more sleep. We'd all have more time to do homework and just to plain live our lives.
I think that five minutes per class period is a small price to pay for happiness.
Comments
It looks great, even if
It looks great, even if lunch is a bit early!
Good reasoning :)
It would be less stressful, but...
...time is too valuable. For every teacher that has five minutes to spare at the end of each class, there is a teacher who needs every last second of class time (and often even more). It's just five minutes per period, but that's 40 minutes per day, roughly 200 minutes per week, and about 7200 minutes per year. Even if 9/10 of the teachers have such spare time (and that's being very generous), that's still 12 hours of lost instructional time.
Wouldn't it be great if days were about 28 hours long?
yes but that's also 40
yes but that's also 40 minutes per day, 200 minutes per week, and 7200 minutes per year of time we could be spending keeping ourselves healthy and happy, which is ultimately much more important than letting teachers get in a little last minute teaching.
i know for a fact that in the past 3 months of spending 10 to 13 hours at school every day, my health and happiness have suffered a lot. you'd be amazed what a little extra time can do for you.
plus, if we're healthy and well-rested, we learn better.
Personally, I think that if
Personally, I think that if teachers had five less minutes in the school day, they would convey the exact same information they conveyed in 50 minutes, and would just waste less time. I don't mean to say that learning is a "waste of time." Simply that for ever 5 minutes extra that we have to persists through, and the sleep depravation from getting home late and staying up doing homework might causes us to zone out for that 5 minutes (or the entire class period?) at some other time during the class.
According to Ms. Linder, it was proposed by the teachers a few years ago to shorten the class periods but the students defeated this.
300 minute rule. 180 days.
You like your free periods?
With 45 minute class periods, you could only have one free period as you would have to take seven classes to fulfill the 300 minute rule. And this also means that if I have a free period already, I can't petition out for P.E.
The problem is that the state requires school be in session 180 days. What this means is that our 400 minute (of class time) school day, which is 100 minutes more than the 300 minute rule each day, is 180x100 minutes, or 18000 minutes more per year. Divide by 60. That's 300 hours. Divide by 24. That's 12.5 days. And those aren't 12.5 school days. That's 12.5 extra 24-hour days OVER the 300 minute, 180 day rule. And that's equal to 60 extra 300 minute school days.
It would be nice if we could get just a little extra break for our toil. A full week for thanksgiving break maybe? Three weeks for winter break? An extra 3-day weekend or two?
i didn't even think about
i didn't even think about state rules. those are silly rules anyways. it's like the state doesn't care if we're killing ourselves just to get an education.
i know this won't ever actually happen, anyways. i just think that if it were even kind of possible, it could make such a huge difference.
24 hours, 365 days
There's only 24 hours in a day, and 365 days a year. It's up to each individual how they spend their time.
Uni's Crazy School Day
I too remember when this issue came up in the past. At that time, the majority of us on the faculty agreed that Uni's day was too long. I can't speak for my colleagues but personally I totally endorse Lauren's point of view, wishing only to add that students should be given that extra hour (or whatever) per day even if not all (::cough cough Halo 3::) would use it to improve their grades or physical health.
As for who "defeated" the proposal, the decision was up to the administration, but I remember some significant objections. Students did legitimately fear that in dealing with the shortened day, teachers would simply shift more of the learning burden after school, as if there were not already enough homework. On the other hand, juniors can attest that I don't run a particularly efficient classroom; dropping anecdotes and alleged jokes could easily make up for the Five Lost Minutes of Physics.
Ultimately we are dealing with cultural issues: students tend to make Uni the center of their lives. (Look at all the people who remain in the building 8th hour even if they don't have afterschool obligations at Uni. Some days my senior year I'd be home for the day by noon.) We could easily shorten the day by spreading lunch over 4th/5th hours (in my school it was 4th/5th/6th) but people like that time for socializing and clubs (many of which are totally bogus but never mind that). Some students use lunchtime and free periods to make serious inroads into their homework, but at least as many take the traditionalist view that "homework" should be done at "home."
I have no strong opinions on this matter---it scarcely affects my workload either way---but I do think a lot of Uni students get too little sleep. Anyone who thinks it's time for reconsidering Uni's crazy school day could scarcely ask for a better starting point than this blog entry.
Lack of sleep IS a big problem with Uni students
I agree with Isaac's reply although I don't really get the 12.5 day bit.
But I do agree with shortening periods, or else it would be even nicer to start school later in the day than normal, even with the same amount of time in school as we spend now. Teenagers are shown to be more actively awake later in the day. (I need to go find that test some doctors did on the subject.) Apparently people were discussing bumping back school a couple hours to give students more sleep in the morning.
I am worried too, though, about teachers adding the lost five minutes as a-whole-lot-more-than-5-minutes into homework, but that brings about the issue of some teachers already not really sticking to the promise of an average of 30 minutes of homework per class each day. Even if there was exactly 30 minutes of homework per class per night (this does not take into account of free periods, and does not count any P.E. homework - when is there any anyway?) that's three-and-a-half hours of homework per night, so IF (which never happens) you somehow got home and started homework immediately at four PM, that would keep you until 7:30, and then you'd have to eat and go to sleep.
But of course, some of us take some time to arrive home, and it could take more than an hour for some people. That would mean they would be delayed finishing by at least an hour, but not everyone even starts homework immediately, and for those who have two-hour long practices or are in plays or other extracurricular activities, students often end up staying up until ten PM for homework, and then they have to eat! Time is a big problem for Uni students, and I for one would appreciate a bit more than six hours of sleep per night.
Starting the day later
But if you started the day later, you'd have tons of problems with transportation. Most Uni students drive to school, but more specifically, their PARENTS drive them to school because many students don't have license, and even if they did, parking is a bottleneck. Parents have to get to work and if the school day started later, parents wouldn't be able to give their children transportation.
True, but. . .
True, but the MTD is available for C-U people, and most people probably could find some way to get here. It is a valid point, though.
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