Is it worth the hassle? Schedule change causes headaches

By: Brylee Shafer

DT high school implemented block scheduling on Tuesdays and Wednesdays to give students more learning opportunities through internships and an introduction to education class, allow teachers longer chunks of time to teach or schedule trips with their students once a week. 

“When we start job shadowing and kids are involved in their internships, the block will help them to have less conflicts, so that they can go to their internships without having to worry about missing other classes,” said internship coordinator and science teacher Mrs. Laurel Rader. 

Many students were confused on the first day of block scheduling, which is to be expected with any major change. The plan is for students to have all of their odd class periods on Tuesday and even classes on Wednesday. Seems easy enough, but wait, it gets more confusing. The following week, students will report to even classes on Tuesday and odd classes on Wednesday. All that and we haven’t even gotten into the other three days of the week. 

Consistency is something we all like to have in our lives, but it isn’t looking like many DT students will have it in their schedules. Mondays and Thursdays have the same bell schedule where every class is 47 minutes long, then Tuesdays and Wednesdays schedules match up with 97 minute class periods, and then Friday is a completely separate schedule. Not to mention the 1:30 out and 10:00 start bell schedules. There’s so much to memorize, it almost seems impossible to keep track of where to be and when. We are only a few weeks in, and the change is already giving students headaches.  

“I don’t like block scheduling because I’m not able to focus for long periods of time, especially when we’re stuck doing monotonous tasks because teachers are just giving us busy work to fill the period,” said senior Haley Robb. 

Not only are we confused with the block scheduling, we also struggled with staying focused during the longer class period. If we’re losing interest in the normal 47 minute class period, how are we supposed to sit in a classroom for 1 hour and 37 minutes learning the same topic? 

According to an article published on mvorganizing.org, psychologists find that the typical student’s attention span is anywhere between 10 to 15 minutes. It’s scientifically proven that we lose focus after a short period of time, yet our highschool classes are 47 minutes and block scheduling periods are 97 minutes. Students get in trouble for “messing around” during class; however, maybe that’s their way of trying to make the class interesting, so they’ll be able to focus. 

While the teachers are trying their best to chunk the material to make the classes manageable, they weren’t officially trained on how to best use the extended time prior to the change. Some know how to chunk their classes to fit this long of a class period, but some teachers have never taught classes in blocks. Most of our teachers have handled it really well, with breaking up the time with brain breaks and different activities, but some classes are hard to focus on, even with the normal bell schedule. The longer periods can leave dead time in the classroom where we’re just waiting for the bell to ring. 

While there are some benefits of block scheduling, it may be causing more hassle for students and teachers than it’s worth. The majority of students, and even some teachers, agree that block scheduling adds more stress to our week.