Recently, the Upper School here at Bancroft underwent- some might say suffered- a change in schedule, the basic times where things happen each day changed. Of course, this was a hard change to make, and for the first few days before settling into a new school year, everything skipped a beat while everyone, without exception, adjusted to the change. Some people haven’t been happy since, while others are more real- or possibly fatal- istic, and maintain it matters little how the schedule operates. Either way, the new schedule here at school has shaken the hornet’s nest, and no one has a good answer, whether the new schedule is an affront to everything good and decent or if, at the end of the day, not much has really changed. Still, by the time you finish reading, and this is done being written, there will be a solid answer, so sit tight, and feel free to be as personally biased as you wish.
First, allow me to regale you with things you already know. Previously, our schedule allowed for 4 classes each day, with a 45 minute club period between first and second block, a 45 minute co-lab after lunch, which was after the second block, and another 30 minute co-lab at the end of the day, after the fourth block. Each class was 75 minutes long, an hour and fifteen minutes, leading to 5 hours spent in class each day, with a total of 2 hours of non-academic time. While all the extra time led to a 7-hour day over the state-mandated 6-hour school day, the format was well-loved for the myriad options to catch up on work, meet with teachers, or simply talk with friends. In addition to all that, the old schedule’s rotation was structured such that a maximum of one class from the beginning of the previous day would happen two days in a row, making the majority of all classes meet every two days, with occasional outliers. Each letter day had a unique rotation and order of classes which, while confusing to any outsiders, ensured classes were as evenly distributed as possible. In storytelling parlance, all was happy and good with the world.
By contrast, the new schedule was reviled for any of a hundred reasons, despite how similar it would end up being to the old order of things. The new schedule has 5 hour-long classes each day with a 40 minute club block after the first two blocks of the day, a 30 minute co-lab after the third block and lunch, and a 40 minute co-lab at the end of the day. Despite there now being 5 classes per day, Students still spend 5 hours in classes, and an earth shatteringly reduced hour and 50 minutes of non-academic time throughout the day. Overall then, the length of the day hasn’t changed in any substantial way, but the way the schedule is arranged has changed substantially. Instead of every letter day in a rotation having a unique and varying class order, two days out of each rotation mirror each other, sharing the same class order. This means in each schedule, some classes will never happen at the end of the day, while others will always appear at the end of the day, a side effect of there now only being three possible arrangements of classes for a six-day schedule rotation, a definite downgrade. The only other major addition to the new schedule is a dedicated community block, a dedicated time for assemblies and other community events which replaces an entire class on B days which, while underappreciated, may be the single most important in the whole new schedule.
In an ideal world, schedule changes would be purely beneficial, with time better utilized each day by students and faculty. The stated goal of the new schedule is of course to have classes meet more often to help students get more out of them, somehow. Frequent, shorter meetings are meant to allow for increased concentration over a shorter span and commensurately greater productivity thanks to more meetings every week, despite that classes meet for the same amount of time every week in both schedules. No matter the purpose or theory, where the rosy possibilities meet reality, there lie significant shortfalls.
To everyone who inhabits the Upper School, one thing can be made relatively clear; no one is entirely happy with the new schedule. The first reason this should be the case is also the most obvious—unfamiliarity. The Upper School, save the freshmen, were used to the flow of the old schedule. When people get out of first period, they still expect to go to Clubs, and the idea of having more than four classes in a day still fills some people with confusion and dismay at times. Basic unfamiliarity informs much of the resentment to the new schedule, especially when unfamiliarity manifests other issues, such as the primary concern of students: workload.
The workload has never been light at Bancroft, but more than just the number of classes was affected when the schedule was changed. While long-term assignments remained largely unaffected, the schedule change increasing the number of times classes met had a profound effect to shorten the time frame of, and subsequent workload imposition of minor, class-to class assignments. With classes meeting more often per week and more classes meeting two days in a row, more homework assignments ‘due by next class’ are handed out, leading to a heavier workload. This is only exacerbated by a major design strength of the old schedule and a critical weakness of the new. Under the old schedule, only one class from each day would ever take place the next day, allowing for two days from assignment to due date in the majority of assignments. Understandably, more time between assignments led to a lesser workload, but deeper than that, students were able to manage and budget their time. With time management options came optimization and efficiency for small, class-to-class assignments, but on large assignments as well. This allowed not only for lesser workloads and stress in students, but also for important time management skills to be utilized and developed, invaluable skills both for college and for life in general. In the new schedule, nobody has any time to creatively manage things, with assignments that just need to be done ‘immediately’, and the development of critical time management skills just never takes place, ultimately keeping students from actually fulfilling the basic mission they are charged with: ‘Owning your learning.’
The third major, and possibly worst, flaw of the new schedule is in the placement and length of blocks in the day. Given the structure of the new day rotation, wherein one day mirrors another, certain classes will take place at the end of the day every time, while others never take place at the end of the day, or always take place at the beginning of the day. This presents a huge issue to many different groups of students. Student athletes who, already being expected of so much, miss some of their classes much more than others, putting them disproportionately behind in certain classes compared to others, classes which they may already struggle with. Students who live far away from school and have to deal with the at-times random traffic of a commute into Worcester each day are similarly disadvantaged, and will miss certain classes disproportionately often, in each case compromising their education. In addition, the change in time allowances from certain non-class periods to others seems at times nonsensical. The co-lab period at the end of the day being lengthened to forty minutes at the expense of the other two non-class blocks is a particularly interesting example. Given that juniors and seniors with privileges can simply leave and skip the block entirely, and that it provides seemingly no added value compared to it’s previous thirty minute incarnation, certain parts of the new schedule begin to seem like change for change’s sake.
With that said, other aspects of the new schedule are absolutely better than the old. While before, assemblies borrowed time from the clubs segment of each day, now community blocks replace a class in the schedule for assemblies, class meetings and other community events. While your average student remains, and likely will always be, ambivalent at best towards assemblies, no one can complain they would rather be in clubs, or had been blindsided and still had work to do, during an assembly. The timing of lunch has also been, while a fiasco in the opening days of school as people adjusted, a worthwhile change. Lunchtime moving back slightly in the day to a more normal hour has been a detriment to exactly no one, a model for the unobtrusive, beneficial change any community would look for in a new schedule, whatever the broader trends of usefulness and satisfaction may be.
Now, things do not look spectacular for the new schedule, in a lot of ways it’s detrimental simplicity pales in comparison to the complicated but extremely fair system of the old schedule. While it may be true that all things have their time, and all times do pass, the passing of the time of the old schedule in favor of the new may have been, at best, slightly premature, at worst, a total mistake. Nothing has the luxury of staying the same, but it would have been nice if, whatever reason the schedule needed to change notwithstanding, the people who would actually be consigned to use the new schedule would have been consulted in its creation. Altogether then, while a new schedule may have been necessary, the many adverse factors which ultimately harm the students using the schedule make the general prognosis on the new schedule less than promising, with students of the Upper School often calling it what it ended up as—change for change’s sake.
