High School: A Big Waste of Time

The following article is based on my own high school experience and may or may not be what you experienced or how your high school may have been set up.

I feel that most of junior high and high school was a waste of time, here's why:

Walking in the hallways- In my high school we had seven slots for classes. We had five minute passing periods to get to those classes. If you add that up, you will find that there is 35 minutes spent simply going from one class to another. This may not seem like a lot of time, but that is 175 minutes a week, not quite three hours. If that number doesn't seem like a lot to you, think of this way. In the 180 days a year that I went to school, 6300 minutes was spent going from one class to the next. That totals to over 100 hours. So much time is wasted walking in the hallways to get to the next place of learning.

Class time- Each of my seven classes were approximately 45 minutes long (perhaps a couple minutes longer). I'd get to class and everyone would be talking. The teacher then would have to try to settle the class time. About 10-15 minutes would be spent on that. Then they would teach and assign homework in the next 15 minutes. After that, class would almost be over and everyone would start talking again, so then the next 15 minutes were spent trying to calm the class down again. It wasn't necessarily like this with all classes, but most of them were. So in that 45 minute period, only 15 minutes was spent with actual teaching. Add that up and not even 2 hours were spent with learning. Not that much for an 8 hour school day if you ask me.

I'm not sure how this can be fixed, but some schools do block scheduling now, thus giving you fewer classes a day. This also means less time spent in the hallway and more time spent in a classroom. Whether or not this will improve anything, we'll have to wait and see. I doubt the average student attention span is all that long, so having a longer class may not do any good if the students attention is going to be elsewhere for longer.