I have been setting up the first classroom observation hours I want to do with a teacher in a nearby town. (One of our neighbors is an English teacher there who introduced me to a biology teacher he thinks highly of when he found out I was starting a teacher education program.) I was surprised when the teacher sent me her daily schedule that the schools there have nine or ten class periods in one day – I had only six when I went to high school!

One difference is that apparently one of the periods is used solely for lunch time, which I think is a good chance to let students socialize and have some time to relax and talk with their friends – hopefully that helps them to be able to behave better when they are expected to be quiet in classes. Forty-five minutes seems like a much more reasonable amount of time for lunch – when I was in high school, fourth period was divided into three parts, during two of which you had class and one where you had lunch. This meant that you only had about twenty-five minutes for lunch, which might be only barely enough to get through the lunch line and eat if you had to buy food that day. It was also annoying and disruptive to have the “B” lunch period, which meant that you had the first half of fourth period, then lunch, then the second half of fourth period. Getting back on track right away after rushing through lunch was not very much fun: students were still in lunch mode for most of the second half of class, and had trouble trying to pick up the subject matter being covered where it had been left off; and teachers had to deal with groggy or fidgety post-lunch learners.

The students in this district also apparently have study hall time built into their day – in fact, on Thursdays there is a special tenth hour specifically built in for them to be able to go over homework with teachers and get extra help that they might need. I think that is a very good idea – I suspect that, by high school, many kids have classes that their parents probably can’t help them with any more. I know that I only had calculus four years ago and I doubt I could do more than the most basic derivatives and integrals any more – let alone after twenty years or more since taking the class. Letting the students have extra access to teachers to answer the questions they have is a great idea to try to make sure as few of them are falling behind their classmates as possible. This system also gives the more advanced students time to get their work done alone if they want to, or even work ahead. And, of course, having time for just working on schoolwork under teacher supervision helps make sure that the schoolwork is actually getting done, instead of the student going home and watching television instead.

The downside to all this is that the district has one of the longest school days in their school conference, which can mean less time for extracurricular activities and less time for homework. But, ideally, a lot of the homework can get done during the study hall time and the special tenth periods. Even though it means a little more work, I personally like the idea of doing as much as possible to make sure the students have the time and the resources to understand and finish as much of their schoolwork as possible. The only thing I can think of to add to the nine-hour days is that, in addition to 6 academic/vocational classes, one lunch period, and one study hall, there be one P.E. class period per day - at least for students who don’t play an extracurricular sport of some kind. Actually I’m not sure how P.E. requirements are set up in this state – in my high school, we had to take either two semesters of gym class or one summer gym class (four hours of P.E. and health a day for five weeks) – not really an ideal system in my mind. I ought to find out if things are different here.