Reflecting on Flex Week: Con

The flex time pilot ended late November, and immediately students began picking sides.  Most students had some strong opinion. Although study hall and three periods a day are enticing for most students, in the long run, flex schedule only dilutes the overall effectiveness of the curriculum. Not only does it take away from total time in each class, the free period only really benefits students who are already motivated to do their work.A major hangup with the proposed flex time system is the increase in period length from 55-to-90-minutes. A student’s attention span can only last so long, and 55-minutes can even be a bit too much, let alone 90. Not only is this less total time in class than the current system, but for many students, it’s a less desirable option. In the end, students lose study time, and are forced to endure extra-long classes that last far longer than are practical. Many teachers couldn’t jam all that teaching into the new schedule, resulting in many students not getting the subject knowledge they need. Some teachers even required students to attend their class during the flex period to make up for in-class time lost. The flex periods will inevitably be used to play catch-up for the work students missed, so what’s the point?Of course, these changes were temporary. If instituted full time, they would make up for the time lost later in the week. With that however, would come longer class periods, longer school days and overall more impatience and less attention, as periods stretch longer than 55-minutes. The loss of time during a.m. period is justified by the other irregular schedules, fire drills, pep rally days, etc. that give A.M. more time than the rest. But this does not fix the problem; what normally happens is when A.M. gets a shorter amount of time, the information is crammed in. When they get more, it is supplemented with extra work. It does not by any means create an equally efficient learning environment, no matter how close the total minutes may end up being.The new system brings up problems for students taking sports, too. Losing Monday practices would negatively impact each team, and as a result many required that they stay after school for one to two hours, making up for the time they lost that day. Once again, the appeal of a three-period day and an overall less stressful school life is invalidated in attempts to make up for time lost. “[It’s] hard to tell with such a limited time...but [flex time] definitely shortens the time we have to work on water polo,” water polo coach Matthew Flanders said.That brings up another flaw in the system: flex time really only benefits those who are motivated to use the time to catch up on work. For some students, the system allows beneficial time where they can work at their own speed and make every second count, but for others, that’s just not how they learn. The system caters to a specific group that will make already successful students excel even more, while leaving behind many that are struggling. Apart from these big problems are numerous smaller ones. There are some that many don’t notice, like how passing periods were discreetly lowered back to seven minutes on Mondays and Tuesdays. Subtle changes in the schedule’s start time from Monday to Wednesday were a lot to keep track of, but for students without an A.M., their late start Wednesday became a 30-minute late start Tuesday. This was certainly a noticeable change. After years of sleeping in on Wednesday mornings, this loss was a heavy blow.Of course, these undesirable changes are a necessary evil. The school has a required minimum number of instructional minutes in a school day, and the funding we receive is based on that. In order to maintain time in class, these changes were implemented. The nine-minute passing periods were initially added at a time when construction caused major traffic jams between classes, and now that that problem is fading, we may be saying goodbye to the extra time.The appeal of the flex time pilot was that it allowed students to choose where to spend their time and in that way excel academically. But, if in order to do this the school has to cut back on class time, there’s no point. Students end up learning less, and wasting more time in 90-minute periods that are in no way twice as productive as two 55-minute ones. It’s clear the current system is not perfect, but there are better alternatives. Flex time only worsens the problem at hand.