From: Marc Afifi (mafifi@redshift.com)
Date: Sat Sep 11 1999 - 03:38:01 PDT
Message-ID: <37DA30FF.4694@redshift.com> Date: Sat, 11 Sep 1999 10:38:01 +0000 From: Marc Afifi <mafifi@redshift.com> Subject: Re: pinhole block scheduling
My $0.02 worth...
I don't teach at a middle school but I have been teaching in a block
schedule for the past five years. I came to this school from a
traditional schedule where we never seemed to have enough time to finish
lab activities so I was delighted to come to a school using the block
schedule. We see all six classes on Monday, and T/TH we see periods
2,4,6 and W/F we see periods 3,5,7. Monday classes are 50 minutes long,
block day classes are 105 minutes long. Here's what I have found from my
experience teaching math, physics, chemistry, and marine science:
There is now enough time to finish the experiments and discuss results.
This is great on the day we do an experiment.
There is too much time on days we don't do an experiment. This is bad.
The students do not do their homework the night it is assigned. This is
bad.
There are fewer passing periods so the administrators are happy.
The math students really suffer and not one math teacher at our school
likes the block schedule. There is a saturation point and students need
to practice concepts prior to taking in new information, so time is
spent in class doing homework and consequently less material is covered
over the course of the year. Some may argue that less is more, but the
math teachers at my school say less is less and I agree with them. If
you are trying to prepare your best students for the AP exams you must
cover the fundamentals in a timely fashion and the block schedule is not
conducive to this due to the aforementioned saturation point.
All three science teachers say they love the block schedule when they
are doing an experiment. They also say that experiments really only have
value when there is appropriate discussion prior to the experiment. We
agree that the best scenario for us would be three regular Monday
schedules and then a block schedule on Thursday and Friday.
The social studies teachers love the block schedule.
The English teachers love the block schedule.
The art teacher loves the block schedule.
The French teacher hates the block schedule for much the same reason
that the math teachers do, but her main complaint is not so much the
saturation point issue (I think she'd like to see her students all day
long every day of the week) but the time between classes without
practice. In fairness, the Spanish teacher raves about the block
schedule.
It would be interesting to see some quantitative data on the relative
achievement of students on the block vs a traditional schedule in terms
of standardized test scores (the efficacy of which is an entirely
different thread). Does anyone know of such analysis?
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