Following last year’s COVID epidemic and the shutdown that ensued, schools have been under a lot of stress deciding whether or not to bring students back into school or keep them at distance learning.
Some counties, such as Kings County, have settled on a new hybrid schedule that combines online learning and on campus learning. A special new schedule was created for this where students would have three to four classes a day. Half of the school’s students would be online and the other half in school.
The new schedule changed the usual 30-40 minute periods into much longer hour and a half periods, periods one through four on monday and periods five through seven on tuesday. This new schedule has had mixed reactions between students and staff alike.
This new bell schedule to be superior to the old one. With the old bell schedule students, like myself, would typically have to cram more work into a shorter amount of time and often take home more work as well. With this new schedule this issue has almost been dissolved. Many of my classes I end up taking little to no homework back to the house, with the exception of my AP and honors classes.
The new bell schedule also enables for class to be less fast-paced, allowing more questions to be asked as well as less pressure to be put on the students to finish classwork. In classes like English or math, a whole lesson can be done with little to no rush, allowing for teachers to likely finish their lesson and assign some classwork to go along with the lesson.
There are a couple issues with this new schedule though that students don’t like, such as the entire hour-and-a-half period being used to work over one subject. Typically the teachers who use the whole class time are math and English teachers. I would agree that this is an issue as students struggle to pay attention to one thing for such a long time, but this could be alleviated by teachers allowing for a short five to 10 minute break in class where students can take a brain break then get back to work.
With these short breaks it would allow for the class to be broken up into chunks, and students would likely do better work as well as learn more. I believe this to be the most impactful and problematic downfall of the new schedule, largely because teachers give no time for students to have a brain break.
Another issue is too little class time being used up, leaving students to sit and do nothing for the rest of class. Although this issue is difficult to solve depending on the length of the lesson, there are solutions. One solution being a short game or activity that would promote learning on said topic but not add any extra work on top of what has already been given to the students.
The schedule change has had a mixed impact on students but I believe the new schedule is superior. Smaller amounts of homework and well as increased learning time benefits students in multiple ways, lowering stress levels with piled on homework and classwork as well as adding extra learning activities that make students more comfortable with working with others. This schedule does have its downfalls but overall the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
