Two Months into School, How Is Westy Feeling about 70 Minute Classes?

By: Sean Tang ‘28

With the threadbare trees on Commencement Lawn shedding their auburn layers, the signs of an increasingly valedictory fall are becoming more and more palpable. The fall term is ending in less than two weeks, with the long-awaited Thanksgiving Break lurking just around the corner. Rather uncoincidentally, the end of the fall term also marks another milestone: more than two months under the new 70-minute-block schedule for the Westy community. 

Since the start of the 25-26 school year, Westy has discontinued the previous 6-day schedule with 45-minute class blocks. Instead, the schedule was revamped to include longer, but quantitatively less 70-minute class blocks, which loosely imitates a 5-day schedule. A heavier emphasis has been placed on weekdays and rotating blocks on Friday and Saturday.

These adjustments were presumably designed by the administration in the hopes of maximizing learning. The longer blocks may allow for discussion and lectures to go in more depth, theoretically fostering a more comprehensive understanding of any given subject.
But after living through two months of the new schedule, the same question remains: has the schedule, in effect, achieved what it had set out to do? 

If a survey of 100 community members–among them 90 students and 10 faculty–is any indication, the transition has been met with a somewhat distinct chill. The results depict a community that is struggling to adapt to this adjustment, as nearly half—49%—of respondents reported feeling negatively about the longer class periods. Only 26% felt positively about the change, with 24% remaining neutral.

But from what seeds may this grudge for the new schedule have originated?

Some more statistics from the survey may reveal a part of the answer. When questioned on how mentally draining they perceived 70-minute classes to be, 66% of respondents noted that they found these classes either very mentally draining or extremely mentally draining; 54% of respondents thought 70-minute classes to be too slow in pace. 

Furthermore, out of 82 applicable responses, 76.8% of the community deemed their workload to be heavier than previous years, as opposed to lighter, an effect that goes against the objective for which the new schedule was created to achieve. Of course, the results of this survey do not account for the common trend for workload to naturally increase as they progress through high school; but the statistic holds significance nonetheless.

What’s more, as it seems, the new schedule has posed a challenge to the mental and physical well-being of Westminster students, too. Multiple students have shared that they are unable to “pay attention to the same thing for 70 minutes,” and that they “feel like a zombie everyday,” especially on “the days [they] have 70 min classes—it’s mentally and physically draining.”

However, it is important to remind ourselves that we are only a little over two months into this new, seemingly eccentric pace of life—and there is much that we can solve and improve as a community. Both students and faculty are still navigating through uncharted waters; solutions will become more discernible as time goes on. 
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Freshwater fish regain their colors in a few weeks after initially losing them when first entering a new environment. As we gradually adapt to our new environment while mustering the collective effort to make it better, Westy, as a unified community, may regain its luster—more iridescent than ever before.