Thoughts on the New Schedule

Dear School Board,

Thank you for giving all the teachers the opportunity to give our input on how we feel about the new A/B schedule. I received the survey you sent out, and I'm eager to respond.

What is positive about the new schedule, you ask? Hmmm. Let me go to the next question and I'll come back to this one, if I think of anything.


What is negative about the new schedule? Oh, School Board, what were you THINKING? I know, I know, it was theorized that struggling students would have more opportunities to pass their courses if all eight, taken simultaneously, were stretched out over a year. If Bubba is struggling with senior English in November, for instance, I now have many more months to rehabilitate him before the course ends in June. But you forgot one thing: if students were already struggling with four courses at once, (especially at my school, which is an NI school that doesn't make AYP) what made you think in your wildest dreams that they would do better with eight? The principal requires that all teachers give homework every night. Students have 8 classes of homework, not to mention ongoing projects, quizzes and tests.


But don't worry about the students. They'll survive. You should be worrying about the teachers! With the previous schedule, we taught three courses the first semester, followed by three the second. Now we're teaching six courses at once. You say it shouldn't matter: by the end of the school year we taught six courses and managed 180 students anyway. But doing it all at once is a killer! Do the math. At 30students per course, we're responsible for about 180 students. Say that every week, five students per class misbehave. That's 30 phone calls I have to make to parents, which is part of the required procedure, and 30 detention forms I have to fill out. Some won't show up for detention, which means that I'll have to fill out new forms for Saturday school, in addition to the detention forms for the new misbehavers of the next week.

Consider not just the grading---the writing of comments and grades on approximately 500 big and little writings a week (journals, essays, summaries, quick-writes, graphic organizers)---but the entry of all those grades into the electronic system Integrade. Now I have to keep six class rosters full of grades, rather than three. Progress reports are required every four weeks between the nine-week report cards, so Integrade must be kept up to date with lots of entries, especially because the principal is always checking to make sure we're giving assignments, and parents check their childrens' grades digitally through ParentConnect. It takes a lot more time to keep 6 class rosters full of grades.

What about the quality of attention I can give my students? When twice as many students are coming in after school for tutorial or extra help, I can't spend as much time with each one. And I want so much to help them! That's why I became a teacher. What about the quality of my grading? I'm an English teacher, so I assign a lot of writing. I look like a pack mule every day as I walk out the door carrying bags of papers which I'll never finish evaluating the way I want to. (For some assignments, I'll just have to settle for a smiley stamp.)It takes me an hour at the end of the day just to sort the piles of papers that come flying at me.

You must also realize that preparing for six classes rather than three involves a mountain of paper and ink cartridges. If I'm going to give handouts to all six classes, I have to print 180 handouts rather than 90. Oh, you say, just print one set for all six classes and pick them up after every class to redistribute to the next class. But much of what I run off is material that I want them to keep or that they have to write on, such as MLA documentation guides, questions for the Brit Lit readings, graphic organizers and the like. All those people from RESA, as well as the folks downtown keep pressing us to use graphic organizers and non-linguistic representations and this and that, and above all, to keep the class engaged at all times. All those handouts cost me money. Did you know there are only 3 copiers at Groves, to serve 100 teachers? And that's if they, the copiers that is, are not broken. Thus, I do most of my copying at home so that I can at least be with my family while I'm printing away on weekends. I buy my own printer cartridges---I'll show you the receipts---and buy my own colored pencils, posters, pens, post-it's, tape, paper clips, folders, and reams of paper to supplement the copy paper distributed by the department. Preparing for six classes at once is definitely more costly.

I almost forgot to mention that planning and teaching six different classes spanning two days is exponentially more exhausting than planning for and teaching three classes two days in a row. Students have different needs and when there are more of them, the curriculum must be adjusted appropriately in more ways. I know the A/B schedule requires the same amount of time commitment daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly for teachers, but it's not the time, it's the expenditure of physical and psychic energy that has now doubled for all your teachers. You already have a shortage of teachers. For the past two school years, you've had to import 300 people from the Phillipines and India to fill all the empty slots. How many additional slots will you have for next year, as teachers take early retirement or go to B. or E. County where they have a 4/4 schedule?

I try not to gripe most of the time because I know I am being generously compensated for my services as a teacher. But I really believe you should consider an alternative schedule. In college, five courses is considered an overload for both teachers and students. Why would a high school consider six and eight a normal load? I'm willing to bet that when you examine the data at the end of the school year, you'll find that students have failed more courses rather than fewer, that the Almighty test scores have declined, and that more students have dropped out or become "fifth-year seniors." Please give me hope that next year we can go back to a more humane teaching schedule.