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Shalhevet news online: When we know it, you'll know it

The Boiling Point

Shalhevet news online: When we know it, you'll know it

The Boiling Point

Shalhevet news online: When we know it, you'll know it

The Boiling Point

School-wide freedom period

 By the BP Editorial Board

This year’s new and spacious schedule sounds promising, and we should all applaud the administration for trying to improve life for students and co-curriculars. Whether you are a fan of the schedule so far or not, our administration deserves great honor for finally, after so many years of complaints, trying to tackle the problems of student stress and homework load while balancing our numerous co-curriculars.

Since we’ve had so little experience with the block schedule, it is too early to gauge its effect on classes. However, one feature, SWAP, or School-wide Appointment Period, foreshadows familiar problems.

SWAP is scheduled to meet once every two weeks. Its stated purpose is to absorb the meetings and academic spillage that would eat into our lunch or make our days too packed for meaningful discussions with teachers.  This is a great idea. But as described, it overreaches and under-serves.

As Mr. Danovitch announced at orientation, Just Community meetings and college visits will also be subsumed under SWAP.  The first problem this creates is that the students in those committees will miss out on the free period, as a source in Agenda confirmed that meetings would take up nearly all of SWAP. Not only do they miss out on the free period, but they are hurt by its having created the expectation that they are available. This also applies to some outside of these groups — perhaps a defendant at a Fairness meeting or an observer curious about the agenda for Town Hall.

The second, related issue is that teachers involved in Just Community activities are also unavailable. Given that there are already way more students than teachers, it is improbable that everyone who seeks or needs an appointment will be able to schedule one, even over a period of weeks.

Taking this into account makes the idea of quality time with teachers hard to imagine. Quality time of 10, 11 or 15 minutes would mean that teachers could only see a handful of students every two weeks. Setting our expectations – and our teachers’ expectations of us — this high for so rare and opportunity could lead to disappointment.

Also, the policy described at orientation, and again at the assembly on the first day of school, limits students to a study hall period in certain rooms if they aren’t busy with a Just Community meeting, college visit, or appointment. Depending on the scope of the word “appointment’,” this policy might or might not be unfairly restrictive.

For example, would a voluntary or student-led co-curricular meeting be allowed?  Could the band practice, as long as not everyone was required to be there?  Could debate team members go over their bills with Mr. Buckley?  Could members of the Basketball team be allowed to practice their jump shots on the Sport Court?  We hope the answer to all these questions would be yes.

Or will everyone really have to sit and daydream or look at books?

We thank and praise the administration for its efforts to improve student life, including Mr. Buckley’s hard work with the complexity of creating a rotating block schedule, and including the creation of SWAP. The challenge now is to address these minor issues of overlap.

SWAP needs to be designed for maximum student freedom. The way to do this is simple: make it similar to a free period, except that teachers should be available for scheduled appointments. This way, students get time to read, think, daydream, work on group projects, relieve stress or improve their academic standing however seems best to them on any given day. And teachers are not fighting the losing battle of policing some students while meeting with others.

The simpler SWAP is, the more likely it is to reach its stated goals.

 

 

 

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