One of the software start-ups I cofounded and sold before I returned to teaching was a pioneer in enterprise and personal calendaring. It’s what Steve Jobs wanted Apple’s calendaring system to become — in fact, even after we’d sold our company to a rival platform, Jobs kept using our software at Apple because he couldn’t live without it. In this way, through a complex diplomatic and contractual dance between two Silicon Valley technology giants, I was tasked, in part, with continuing to provide personalized tech support to his secretary for over a year after his return to Apple.
It was all part of a long, strange, interesting journey.
For several years, day in and day out, I focused on this lifeline technology by which people manage and protect the one resource none of us can ever make more of.
And it changed me.
Mostly it woke me up to how humans think about time — both our own and other people’s. We find time, lose time, take time, waste time, invest time, stretch it to the max. As with calories, none of us are entirely honest with ourselves. There’s a gap between how we think we spend our time and how we actually passed it. Accurately tracking how you spend your time is like jumping into freezing water. It wakes you up.
Lately, I’ve been paying attention to how we work with time in the learning environment. It’s not a trivial question, though most people — including the experts — seem to think you can massively oversimplify it without any impact. But that’s turning out not to be the case. In 2019, with the passage of SB 328, the California legislature and Governor Newsom took it upon themselves to add in another new mandate that has had dramatic and unintended consequences on how much time is actually available for teaching and learning in the high school schedule.
Here’s how it adds up.
At the purely operational level, a high school’s weekly bell schedule is an exercise in layered mathematical modeling of people, places, and things. It has to balance a range of competing interests and mandates in ways that only military logistics planning can rival.
Legal, contractual, safety, transportation, and other logistics all have to be factored into its design — and that’s before we can start considering educational factors. It’s not at all uncommon for a high school’s administrative team to have to go back to the drawing board three or four times before they get a proposed bell schedule approved as having met all of the warring requirements at all the different levels.
Because of all these competing requirements, SFUSD high schools design their schedules along two axes: they operate on a seven-period day, with students taking six to seven full-year classes and moving from one to the next, in a rotation determined by SFUSD’s modified block scheduling strategy. Under this plan, each course meets four times a week across the five days of the school week. The required instructional minutes are divided up to meet state Education Code mandates as well as all the logistical constraints described above.
At this point, it seems like we’re just making our educational decisions based on what we can shoehorn into the spaces between the obstacles.
So … what does this look like in practice? That depends. It’s different at every SFUSD high school, due to the differing requirements of each school’s size, facilities, and program.
At Lowell, every course and class period meets on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays, straight through from first period through seventh period, with one of two possible lunch periods sort of in the middle. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, we have fewer classes meet, but each one meets for a longer period in a practice called “modified block days.” At Lowell, this means that even-numbered periods meet for 90 minutes apiece on Wednesdays while odd-numbered periods meet for 90 minutes each on Thursdays. Wednesdays also serve as our early-dismissal days, freeing up time when the whole staff can be available to meet, receive training/professional development, or collaborate in smaller groups as needed.
Did you have to read that twice? I know I did. Spare a thought for next year’s ninth graders.
Whenever some new requirement or mandate gets handed down from on high, every high school principal in California buries their face in their hands, weeps bitter tears, and then rips up all their previous work before starting over to build out a new and legally compliant high school bell schedule that can get approved for their school.
First they have to get this approved, which often takes two or three tries. Then and only then can they roll it out to us teachers so we can start figuring out how on Earth we’re going to map the curriculum we’re required to teach with the squiggly arrangements of instructional minutes being made available to us.
Now, we teachers are a pretty resilient bunch. We’ll work with whatever hare-brained, Wile E. Coyote required arrangement of instructional minutes we get handed in any given year because that’s the nature of the dysfunctional system we signed up for.
But at this point, it seems like we’re just making these decisions based on what we can squeeze into the spaces between the obstacles.
SB 328 added yet another ill-conceived logistical constraint — a mandatory later school start for high school — based on a hypothesis about teenagers’ physical and psychological well-being that nobody even seems to be measuring. Certainly nobody thought to require an educational component for the teenagers who seem unaware of how this time shift is supposed to help their health and well-being.
So here we are once again, shoehorning in students’ learning where we can find the time to fit it in rather than empowering schools to design a structure that will accomplish its intended learning purposes with maximum ease and minimal wear and tear on all concerned.
Isn’t it about time we started planning high school students’ schedules and their learning more intentionally?
