Which Subject Matter Matters?
Electives such as Journalism, Yearbook, Debate, Entrepreneurship and Physical Education(PE) are listed on official Athenian schedules as being held during Conference and Collaboration(C&C) time. In theory, this isn’t a problem. A lot of students don’t have classes then, so it’s a good time for teachers to hold office hours and for students to do homework.
But when your teacher says that their only available times are during your PE class, you look at the schedule and wonder how on earth we got to this point. Half of the woodwinds leave midway through E-Band during the shortened end-of-day period on Monday in order to go to basketball practice. Band members can only hope that, despite conflicted schedules, maybe they’ll practice their parts on their own. Your C period teacher says on Friday that it’s the last class of the day, and you sigh and mutter that you have Journalism after this. By the time an administrator says that we sort of have a late start on Wednesday because the first class is E period, you barely even bother rolling your eyes, because everyone knows the arts don’t matter!
I’m well aware that there isn’t really anywhere else to put E Period besides Monday. I know office hours are important and that teachers being available at the end of the day is critical for a lot of students. I understand why the schedule is organized the way it is. It’s difficult, logistically, to fit seven full-length class periods into a five-day week, and even harder to afford extra time for Electives and PE, especially considering the classes for which we need to share spaces with the Middle School and the added complications of community meetings, advisory, C&C, and community service. But even within the constraints of our schedule, we can do better.
Maybe we shift Monday’s schedule up fifteen minutes and get rid of Wellness Time so E period can have as much class time as every other class. Maybe we hold more visual arts classes during E so it has a little more traction, or if we’re feeling really radical, just stop pushing all entry-level performing arts classes to their own period. We could pretty easily not list PE and Elective as official C&C times and instead ask teachers to name a couple class periods during which they will hold office hours. Perhaps we could shift Elective or PE up to directly after lunch on certain days, before the last lettered class period, so they aren’t quite so disproportionately affected by students leaving for sports. I don’t know exactly how feasible all of these changes are, but something needs to happen. It’s hard to ask my peers to respect these classes more when our schedule doesn’t.
Practical concerns aside, there’s a clear reason these classes are so often pushed to the side. Really, it all comes down to the eternal question: is Athenian a college prep school? To the extent that it is, E period, Elective, and PE really don’t matter as much as other classes. They aren’t classes like math or history—they’re effectively extracurriculars. But regardless of how much we are a college prep school, we’ll always be more than that. For as long as we keep talking about our pillars and our mission of developing the whole student (even if Gabe and I are the only people here who actually know what the Mandala is and what it means), we need to be treating all disciplines as equally worthwhile.
