New Schedules and a Student Uproar

Luca Katzen, ‘22

    With the new semester now fully underway, many students are struggling to keep up with the new class schedule. Whether it is the additional class everyday, the significantly increased workload, or the tens of hours of screens each day, students are already tiring out with the majority of the semester still to come. Before the criticisms of the new schedule are discussed in detail, a couple things should be noted. First, a tremendous amount of time, work, and consideration goes into the creation and implementation of the BHSEC class schedules, which is definitely appreciated by the students. Second, 2020’s fall semester schedule may have seemed ideal for students, but it doubled the workload for teachers with the smaller class sizes for in-person learning. With that in mind, here are the main complaints from students:

Screentime

    While spending time on screens is not a complaint teenagers in the 21st century make often, there is a limit. Regardless of the grade, students report around six hours of online classes everyday plus additional time spent online for clubs and homework. Compared to last semester, students of all grades are experiencing less free time in their schedule to do homework or take breaks from screens, with many students having to be on the screen straight from 9 am - 3:20 pm at least one day a week (with one break for lunch). Eleanor Crowther, ’21 claims that she “can easily spend 10.5 hours in classes and in club meetings… That doesn’t mean, however, that I only spend 10 ½ hours on zoom. I’m often on my computer during my lunch period doing homework for my classes or responding to emails. Similarly, I find myself staying on my computer hours after school has ended doing homework as a large amount of my homework is online.” Given that Bard is notorious for its large amounts of homework, the time spent in online classes and clubs doesn’t begin to cover the amount of time students actually spend on screens. In addition, most homework is fully online with the lack of hands-on work available for remote learning. In fact, most students report that the only homework that they are assigned off a screen, is seminar or literature readings. 

In terms of physical burnout, all of the students that were interviewed described some kind of physical discomfort they were feeling as a result of their time spent on the computer. Isabella Motch, ‘24 mentioned that eye pain, trouble concentrating, and inconsistent sleep schedules are problems she is all too familiar with, due to spending the majority of her time on a screen. Even teachers complain of increased fatigue and eye pain as a result of their time on screens - which is worsened for everyone by the lack of time outside that students and teachers are allowed with this schedule.

Classes

    The new schedule has also brought with it an additional “office hours” or asynchronous period of teaching for every class, every week. While this period might have been intended to be a consistent period every week for students to catch up on work or meet with teachers, the reality is that many teachers are either treating this period as an additional class period, assigning work to be completed during the period or changing the office hours period every week, making it impossible for students to plan their time. Mia Culbreath, ‘24 also notes that, “I do miss how our old schedule had on and off days — the work felt more evenly spread out and I think it allowed me time to regain energy after a full day of classes. I do have free periods now, but they are randomly spread out across the week which I am not a fan of.” Although the old schedule was intentionally formatted to fit the blended learning model, many students found the ‘on and off’ day schedule was a lot easier to manage and plan around. It should also be mentioned that the increased amount of free time in the old schedule made it a lot easier to balance the increased amount of homework Bard introduced when online learning first started in March 2020. Currently, students are getting significantly more homework than they did prior to the pandemic to make up for the fact that the curriculum has been shrunk drastically.

Proposed Solutions

In general, student proposed solutions to the new schedules fell into two categories; ‘on and off’ day style schedules and screen-less homework.

Bringing back the ‘on and off day’ formatted schedule was definitely the most popular out of the proposed ideas. This involves condensing all of the core class periods (math, science, history, english and language) into three days during the week and leaving the remaining two days for electives, office hours, homework, and time off of screens. This would allow students and teachers alike to better distribute their time and break up the ten hour blocks of screen time that students are experiencing currently. This method would also ease the transition from remote to blended learning which was the original goal of this schedule last semester. It is crucial to mention that this does not mean shrinking/splitting up class sizes, rather this implies that until blended learning actually happens, classes will remain at their normal sizes. All in all, this seems like the easiest and most effective way to solve the new schedule problem while keeping in mind the interests of both students and teachers. 

The second proposed change is to alter the way classes are taught and homework is assigned so that they are easier to pay attention to for long periods of time. Eleanor Crowther, ‘21 described it best when she said, “I would love to have assignments that ask me to write something on a physical piece of paper rather than typing it on a google doc... I would love to [also] see more dynamic teaching. It’s difficult to pay attention to lectures, let alone online lectures and presentations. Perhaps they already do, but I would love for teachers to think more about ways to get us off our screens and ways to bring teaching to life rather than just getting through material as fast as possible.” While this might seem like it would bring more work for teachers, assigning group activities, debates, or active discussions instead of lectures would decrease the amount of prepared material teachers would have to make. In addition, many students (especially underclassmen) only see their peers on Zoom calls so providing group activities where students can interact with each other would be greatly beneficial. Finally, online homework just adds to the hours students are already spending everyday on a screen. Students would really appreciate more physical homework (even reading from a physical book instead of an online textbook) that allows them to focus on something other than a screen for a set period of time. While this is not an easy task for teachers or the administration (given the struggle everyone involved is having in picking up books) written or hands on homework instead of -not in addition to- online homework would be tremendously helpful to students. 

Until school resumes in-person learning allowing students to get away from screens for extended periods of time, the class schedule needs to be altered in some way. Although many students are hopeful that the administration will make any changes to the schedule, it is highly unlikely that they will come before high schools are rumored to reopen in April. Do you have any suggestions for the administration? Email them to: lk784m@bhsec.bard.edu 

Student Schedules 1st Semester vs. 2nd Semester:

Mia Culbreath ‘24

Alexa David-Lang ‘22

Eleanor Crowther ‘21