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Why were they only taking 4 classes per day? They are 30 minutes longer than my high school classes were, but we had 7+ different classes per day. I'm pretty s

• bzbarsky 12y ago
  The article covers this: (Note: we have a block schedule; not all classes meet each day) The reality is that in a typical 1-hour class with 5 minute breaks between classes on a big campus you lose the first 5 minutes of class to people arriving late and the last 5 minutes to everyone packing up their books so they can rush our the door. So you get 50-minute classes, or about 5/6 of your nominal instruction time. And if you have to do a lab or something, you either have to do double-period classes or stick to labs that can be effectively completed in 40-45 minutes (because you need time to set up and clean up too). So enter block scheduling: the idea is to lengthen the classes to 90 minutes or so and alternate days when they meet. You still lose 10 minutes of each class, but that's 8/9 of your nominal instruction time, not 5/6. And teachers get a bit more flexibility in terms of what things can be done with a class. The drawback is that if you lecture for the full 80 minutes, the outcome is typically not so great: it takes an exceptional lecturer, or an exceptional student, or for some sorts of material both, to pull off someone still being able to absorb information in a lecture that's longer than an hour.