In recent years many educators have voiced their concern about as losing our edge in the global marketplace as well as an apparent decline in American students' achievements. This has become a recurring belief for many teachers, parents, and school districts throughout the United States. As a result, many states have begun to increase the amount of units necessary to fulfill graduation requirements in hope to enhance education and make American students more globally competitive.
As many districts have found, it is not feasible to add more subjects to the already demanding 6-or 7-period days. The problem in doing so is that there was little time for electives. At the same time they began to find that adding classes only took away time from other parts of the curriculum already established. While some districts fumbled with the idea of adding classes and minimizing losses in other areas, a large number of schools, more specifically 25-40 percent of U.S.
high schools adopted block scheduling
(American Federation of Teachers, 1999). It is apparent the block scheduling craze is thought to be a fix all solution to the problem, at least for those districts and individuals looking for anything to help increase the status quo.
In a nutshell, block scheduling is the practice of breaking up school time into blocks or units of classroom time. More recently we have seen this practice redefined to stand for a restructuring movement for longer classroom periods. Typically average class periods ranged from 45-50 minutes long. Block scheduling has taken this traditional style of time management and have increases class periods anywhere from two to four times longer. As one might be amazed at the novelty of more time in the classroom, it is vital to understand that number of class periods are correspondingly decreased, thus...
Sorttof
I came to my high school which runs on block, from a school that didn't. I agree that if you do miss a day or two it is very hard to make up, but many of the other problems are really not there. And my favorite plus is one that you forgot, if you take Chemistry first semester you can take AP chem next, same with foreign languages, Latin 3/4 one semester then 5/6 the next. Concentration is not an issue as there is a 20 minute break between periods 1 and 2, between 2 and 3 is a 35 minute lunch, and betweeen 3 and 4 there is a 15 minute break. This gives us a time to cool down. In sciencee classes obviously you have more time to do the lab as you now have 93 minutes instaed of 47. those few minutes cut out of class, well as you know as class doesn't start immeadiately, usually the first five minutes and the last 3 are wasted so that makes up for your minutes. Drama, band, etc. has more time each day to become better and the amount of books you haul around are less. I like your essay but I think you missed a couple things. Thanks
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