THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, March 17, 1995 TAG: 9503170045
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Jennifer Dziura
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines
IN HIGH SCHOOLS with traditional schedules, classes last about 50 minutes. In some classes, roll call takes up half of that time.
In these classes, the teacher generally begins by calling out the names of his students alphabetically and in monotone. The process is invariably prolonged by several types of people: 1) the student whose name the teacher cannot pronounce and never will be able to pronounce, but who insists on phonetically spelling her name for the class every morning; 2) the guy who's asleep and allows his name to be called eight or nine times before some equally torpid classmate grunts and points to the inert figure; and 3) the jerk who wants to discuss the whereabouts of each and every absentee.
The teacher calls out ``Cornelia de Vaandertraap?'' and the jerk in question says something like ``I think I saw her in the hall last bell,'' or ``Yesterday she said she was going to the beach,'' or ``She's having a heart-lung transplant.''
Teachers' grade books generally have a little box in which the teacher puts a check representing the student's physical presence in class or the letter A for ``absent,'' or some similar symbol. It's not as if there's a box for ``at Taco Bell,'' and another for ``rammed car into marquee on way to school.''
Anyway, if 10 minutes daily of a 50-minute class are spent taking roll, that's 30 hours per year in just one class spent stagnating while Cornelia explains how to pronounce ``de Vaandertraap.'' For one who takes six classes, that's 180 hours per year spent taking roll.
If each student in a school of 2,500 spent those 180 hours working for minimum wage, the students would collectively earn $1,912,500 in one year. If time is indeed money, those 2,500 students have lost $7,650,000 throughout their high school careers.
Academic experts agree that our time is wasted; on average, only 28 minutes out of a 50-minute school day are used for teaching according to one University of Virginia professor.
It would be prudent to seek ways to reduce this wasted time. One method currently being tried at many local high schools is block scheduling.
The general concept behind block scheduling is that Cornelia de Vaandertraap enrolls in eight classes, and goes to four of them Monday and the other four Tuesday, and the first four again Wednesday, and so on. Each class is roughly twice as long as before. This makes chemistry students happy because they can do longer labs, and it makes Cornelia happy because her class has time to review material right before tests.
Additionally, students such as Cornelia must sit through roll call only four times per day instead of six, saving her 60 hours per year. If time is money and 2,500 students save 60 hours per year, those 2,500 students collectively save $637,500 worth of time annually. That's 2,550,000 ice cream sandwiches those students could buy if they spent their time flipping burgers.
In reference to the more commonly cited benefits of block scheduling, I talked to Princess Anne High School junior Chris Bowers, whose school uses block scheduling.
Me: ``So, whaddaya think about, um, block scheduling?''
Chris: ``Well, you only have half as many classes to prepare for every night, and it's much less stressful than before. And teachers can go into greater detail about things.''
Block scheduling sounds like a pretty good idea, and not just because of the ice cream sandwiches. Students who want to go to Harvard could take eight classes instead of six; we'd all learn more; and each of us would gain 240 highly valuable hours throughout our high school careers. MEMO: Jennifer Dziura is a junior at Cox High School. If you'd like to
comment on her column, call INFOLINE at 640-5555 and enter category 6778
or write to her at 4565 Virginia Beach Blvd., Virginia Beach, Va.
23462.
by CNB