You will never believe this, even after you read it. I hope you haven’t anyway…surely the rotating block schedule is not a trend…
Posted in Featured educationAn acquaintance has been substituting at one of the local middle schools. They are still on the “block” schedule. Having taught high school biology on the block, let me just say….I hate it. And honestly, I can’t emphasize enough just how much I hate it.
Honestly I could feel this page with the words “I HATE IT” and you couldn’t possibly understand just how much I despise the whole idea.
Anyway, I will leave it be, the part about hating it that is. There’s something even worse. this thing called a rotating block.
I don’t even know if I can properly explain it but I am going to try. Here are the details:
1. They have 5 blocks of 1.5 hours each. (that’s bad but it gets worse)
2. Each day of the week they rotate the blocks. (no really, what were they thinking?)
3. Monday, they go to blocks 1,2,3,4,5 in that order.
4. Tuesday, they go to blocks 5,1,2,3,4 in that order. (Ok, I am a bit confused but stay with me here.)
5. Blocks 3 an 4 are enrichment periods. (I can’t define enrichment exactly but ok, enrichment).
6. So, on Wednesday, the order goes to 3,4,5,1,2
7. And, Thursday is ……heck I don’t know…
I asked the person who told me about this and she couldn’t remember it past Wednesday either, she just said, “it’s just posted in the rooms”.
Well, yea…….am I nuts? Or is that system nuts? And, what the heck is enrichment?
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ok, blocks…I understand, not clear on why you hate it…but it sounds like a period of time to do X…Why rotate them? Is it so that no one teacher gets stuck w/ the after lunch sleepies, or what?
I have no clue why the rotating is implemented. However, having taught in a high school using the block system, I could give you an endless list of reasons why I am not fond of it. For one, a real big one, the only class that I saw it to be beneficial was math. In most other courses, a great deal of time is spent idle. Especially with the addition of classes like “Understanding Media” where they do nothing but read the newspaper and write a short synopsis of any one article they read, or “Teen Connections” which I have yet to understand. I was told it was a “home ec kind of” class.
The school I taught at was on the verge of losing their accreditation for various reasons and if you don’t know what that entails, I could tell you but it would take about a week. I was merely there for the semester filling in for someone on maternity leave. However, because of the school situation, they had a company who hired retired teachers out of the same school system to come in twice a week to evaluate the teachers. And, they had a set of guidelines that were not just ridiculous, they were wicked ridiculous. For one thing, no “in class assignments” were allowed, the 90 minutes was to be spent on lecture and question and answer sessions BUT and this is huge BUT homework every night was mandatory. If you didn’t have a homework assignment on your plan book for every night, they wrote you up for it, if you didn’t have a grade recorded for homework, every night, you were written up for that as well. If you took any class time to go over homework exactly as it was assigned, for instance, question 1 was blah blah blah, can someone tell me what you got for an answer? Then you were written up. They allowed you 3 minutes at the beginning of the period for housekeeping and none at the end of the period. That was 90 minutes of beating those kids over the head and it was exhausting for the students and guess what, they hated it.
So, this group of people were not just observing and giving you tips to help you improve, they were practically evaluating you twice a week and then critiquing you down to the way you assigned homework and the questions you asked the students on tests were checked as well. The wording of the questions, the answers you accepted and the grades of the students were all analyzed. You had to ask a certain number of questions of each kind, multiple choice, fill in the blank, discussion.
Now, if you are thinking that this sounds reasonable enough for a school in danger of losing their accreditation with a failure and drop out rate over 50%….well it might be if you had 55 minutes for the interactive part and you already know how I feel about homework so that was totally out of my thought process. Basically I was being forced to do things the way a retired teacher in the system (and not necessarily one that came from an accredited school when he/she retired) wanted it to be done.
So, if that one reason isn’t enough, even in a school where the teacher wasn’t being evaluated, 90 minutes is a long time and you are still expected to assign homework every night. The only times the block time slot would be beneficial would be if you had labs. And this was a biology class so that would have been awesome, right? But they didn’t have a lab. No lab equipment. Nada, nothing.
And, all that takes me back to homework? That’s ridiculous, they’ve spent 90 minutes with you, why in the heck do you expect them to go home and spend another hour doing homework just for your class?
As I said, the rotating part, I really don’t know the intended reason but I expect just as you said, it keeps the kids from being in the same class right after lunch, or the last block of the day or having pe first block every day. I think it probably is beneficial to the fact that many children leave school after lunch for medical appointments and with the rotating block, they don’t necessarily miss the same class or classes every time they check out even if it is late in the day.
But, from my standpoint, I like structure, I like organization and with that chaos going on, I just don’t see me functioning well. I don’t have ADD but my husband does and when I read the schedule to him, he almost flipped out. He looked like bugs bunny had just hit him over the head with a sledge hammer, his eyes were bugging out with big springs.
See I could go on forever