Everyone has had the experience of waking up on a Wednesday, feeling the motivation sapped from their body.
The idea of submitting assignments on Google Classroom, taking notes in various color-coded notebooks, and reviewing for tests seems almost absurd. The wave of jaded frustration takes control, a glaring symptom of going to school for five days in a row. The constant stream of assignments and early wakeup times compounded with running personal responsibilities are the perfect recipe to make the thought of staying home all the more tempting, a temptation that students are giving into more and more as the years go by.
So this begs the question, what should be done about it?
Mount Carmel principal Mr. Scott Tabernacki has an idea. “[MC president Mr. Brendan Conroy] had talked a little bit about a four-day week,” said Mr. Tabernacki. “And I kind of just thought it was an interesting way to tackle a lot of different challenges we face.”
The challenges faced by students are multifaceted, a mix of stress and their first experience budgeting their schedule. The four-day week would give students a little more leeway with the time budgeting part, as they would have more time to complete assignments and projects that may be a little harder to catch up on during a busy week.
“Some of the schools that I’ve talked to see an increase in student engagement with the four-day week,” said Mr. Tabernacki. “They see higher work completion rates and work turn in rates.”
Dean of Faculty Mr. Bill Nolan contends that the four-day week is not just about the students, though. He feels whole half the equation, teachers, has been missing thus far.
“There is a rhythm to the week,” said Mr. Nolan. “There’s a build up the whole week and then you have a quiz on Thursday or Friday. If you have a hole in the week, it throws that rhythm off for teachers.”
While it is true that teachers’ wants and needs should be taken into account, the goal is to teach kids. While Mr. Nolan may be the kind of person who can wake up at 4:30 am with no issues, the average high school kid’s schedule is a constant battle between responsibilities and sleep.
“I need my sleep,” said senior Quincy Collins. “If we had another day off during the week I could catch up on it, making it easier for me to focus in school.”
Johns Hopkins Medicine reports that teenagers experience a shift in circadian rhythm, making it difficult for them to fall asleep before 11pm. The logical next step would be to allow them to catch up on much needed sleep on an extra day off.
Most adults, especially school faculty, would agree that school should be preparing students for the real world, so students should be the ones fighting to conform to the system. While this is true, the main goal of school is to make students learn. School should teach life lessons, but not at the cost of education. The school schedule should fit the students, not make the students fit into it. As Collins said, sleep leads to better focus, and the goal should be to keep students engaged and ready to learn.
Unfortunately, another part of the student schedule as of late has been chronic truancy. In my lifetime, I have seen kids that had perfect attendance in middle school miss a day per week after quarantine, and many more absent students per class than previous to quarantine.
Per Brookings, rates of chronic truancy have nearly doubled for all age groups, this issue compounding in high school when kids start to hold down new responsibilities such as jobs and taking care of siblings. Personal issues such as home problems and mental illness begin to rise to the surface, and kids are missing more school than ever.
Though school administrators have taken steps to prevent this, the fact is still that kids miss a lot of school now. Even just last year, MC had an issue with students frequently taking early dismissals to catch trains and get to work, so new rules had to be instituted to punish that and dismissal had to be moved ten minutes back. With a new day off, some of the responsibilities and other things that kids need to take care of have less of a chance of cutting into the actual school week.
The last few years have shown us that maybe it is time for a change. Students will always have complaints, and so will staff, but maybe it’s time to experiment with something different. In high school, an age where there are so many moving parts in a student’s life, maybe it’s time to give them a little break to fulfill their rapidly increasing responsibilities. It’s difficult to balance sleep, sports, work, and anything else that a kid may be doing in this day and age, so why not give them an extra day to do it.
