With the 8 45-minute periods there’s a way to have long science classes. Two days a week they’re lab days, which means they take up 2 consecutive periods. The other 3 days a week you have either gym or study halls. The system works well at our high school. I like being able to sleep in until 7:30 every day, and if you manage to get the first 2 periods free you can wake up at 8:15. For teens this is an especially good thing because studies prove that our circadian rhythms tell us to sleep from 12-8 and not 10-6, like the kids in elementary school. Also, we don’t have a fixed lunch period for everyone because our cafeteria’s not big enough to hold everyone. Rather you have a lunch in one period 4-7. If we had only 4 or 6 periods a day we wouldn’t be able to fit everyone into the cafeteria. Though I’m sure block scheduling’s good for some school, regular scheduling is the best choice for our high school.
Thirty minutes is an exageration, of course, but this can often take 10 minutes, easily. Some days it is much less, of course, but some days it is crazy. Furthermore, there is a psychological “adjustment” time–after four minutes in the hall, kids are wired–they pack an amazing amount of socialization into 240 seconds, and they ocme in with thier minds full of that, and full of whatever they did in eaqrlier clases. Getting them into an English mindset, or a Math mindset takes time. Now, it takes less time for GOOD teachers, but, hell, good teachers need the least help anyway. For a teacher it is really frustrating to finally get a group of kids quieted down and on task (again, some days are harder than others) only to have the period end and all your work come undone.
My kids are 9th grade, btw, DDG.
For example, today we talked about thesis statements. My first two blocks are college-prep kids, and they got the idea quickly and we moved on to other things–they had a quiz and two tests to get through. The last block is ‘regular’ and these kids need more time. We spent about 70 minutes talking about thesis statements, and it wasn’t until the last 15 minutes or so that some of the kids really, really started to get it. Now, had I stopped in mid lecture after 45 minutes, I could not have just picked up where I left off tomorrow. I would have had to rehash everything, and I would not have been nearly as effective. Some critical single concepts just take more that 45 minutes to explain properly.
Now, as far as kids being bored, all I can sAay is that that is just as much a problem in a 45 minute class wiht a ppoor teacher. Yes, a 90 minute block requires you to do several activites in order to keep kids from going mad with boredom. My college prep kids had a grammer review, an indefinite pronoun quiz, a subject-verb agreement test, and an essay test on To Kill a Monkingbird today, along with the introduction to thesis statements. But when you do have a lesson that dosen’t fit into a 40 minute slot, it is so sweet to have the option to do more.
Well, okay, everybody’s making good points here, but I’m still not real convinced, and I won’t be a bit surprised to hear, along about the time that my youngest is a senior, which will be in about 6 years, that “we now know…” that block scheduling isn’t the Next Big Thing any more and they’re looking around for the “Next” Next Big Thing.
Remember the “hey, look at how well the Japanese kids do on test scores! Maybe we should model our schools after the Japanese schools” talkie-talk?
I’m such a cynic. 