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Volume 16, Issue 4 www.facebook.com/sagehillschool
More ‘Wednesday’
Schedules?
A Faculty Committee Considers Options for More Student Facetime By Kristin Saroyan
16saroyank.publications@gmail.com Comprising faculty members from each department, for the past year a special committee has met once a month, conducted research and created surveys in their quest for the superlative Sage Hill schedule. “We were given the task about a year ago to examine whether we were optimizing the teaching environment,” math teacher Nate Miller said. “So we did an initial survey about a year ago, and most people are actually pretty content. There is a spectrum, but there’s definitely an underlying feeling that we don’t have the class time that we would like to have.” Such a feeling is warranted, as Miller said that Sage students have approximately two fewer weeks of class time over the course of the entire school year than most high schoolers. “I think with all the programs that we offer like Spring at Sage and service learning, when you compare us directly to other schools, we have significantly less face to face class time,” Miller said. “One of our main goals is to look into whether we can gain some of that back without necessarily extending the school year or starting earlier. Can we just take the current schedule and find the time?” Miller and his committee devised a survey for the faculty and staff to probe their opinions on several new schedule options. The first new option is to extend the length of each block, but survey participants did not heavily support this idea. “The minuses are that we would have a little less time for conference, advisory and even passing periods in that scenario,” Miller said. “The faculty does not believe this would be much better than our current schedule, so I do not necessarily think this will be a change that happens. In the next schedule scenario on the survey, students would sit down for each
class four times each week instead of three times with the addition of more “Wednesday” schedules where students meet with each of their classes for a shorter amount of time throughout the day. “There is a small group of teachers that really feel they would benefit from seeing students more often,” Miller said, “especially lower-level classes and language classes where it’s more important to have regular contact.” However, the plan to hold three “Wednesday” schedules each week would likely provoke pushback from the typical Sage Hill student, who rejoices at the prospect of an entire month without a single “Wednesday” schedule as a result of service learning and national holidays. “I think the Sage schedule as of right now is definitely pretty well-rounded because the longer classes really help students to get the most out of class time,” senior Natalie Moshayedi said. “I truly enjoy our block schedule considering that we do not have many Wednesdays at all during the year.” According to Miller, the survey also considered making smaller changes to the schedule that would hopefully have a large impact. Ideas for smaller changes include switching Thursday advisory and Friday conference, moving our current “Wednesday” schedule to Monday, and meeting with advisory during lunch instead of conference. “None of these ideas seems to be much better than what we currently have. When you put 80 people in a room, it’s going to be very hard to agree on anything. Everyone is used to the schedule and reluctant to change, but also some people feel really strongly one way and another,” Miller said. “In the end, although we did a lot of thorough work and looked at a lot of options, I do not think a lot is going to change,” he said. “There is a lot to work out even behind the simplest changes. With every tiny decision, there are a lot of ramifications.”