CHANGES IN THE DAY AND WEEK
DELIA F. DIZON
Variation in the length of class periods have been developed as the period is used for differing purposes. The use of an activity period, for instance, is well known in many schools, and of the homeroom period in more. Those tend to be briefer periods to accomplish things that require less time, and commonly come at a given time of day for all students so that the bell signal system, the noise of student passing, and the utilization of rooms will be orderly. However, with the dependence on bells, the better acoustical treatment of halls and classrooms and availability of educational spaces of varying capacities, some modern schools are experimenting with modular time schedules in which periods of various lengths are used for various subjects. A base period of ten or fifteen minutes is employed, and multiples of this unit are created for general education, for physical education, for laboratory work, and for other activities.
Such a plan challenges the ingenuity of those responsible for the development of a reasonable schedule, but certainly has justification in terms of the flexibility possible for individual student programs. It is reasonable to assume that such a plan will be more readily developed in a small high school, yet further elaborations, particularly in de-centralized larger schools, may hold even greater promise for quality program offerings. That the modular schedule succeeds is clearly established in several schools . Since the early days of the junior high school, the arrangement of the schedule for successive days within the week has been varied. The practice in most secondary schools, however, has tended to avoid the possible confusion of such schedules, and the typical school today tends to have a fixed pattern of periods each day of the week. Yet the limitations of such a plan are obvious and so the floating period and the other variation on static and rigid plan have been increasingly common. In such plans, currently found in modern schools, the period of a given subject is inserted into the traditional schedule at a differing time each consecutive day in the week, thus providing the each class to meet but four times each week in the case of a five or six period school day. Such an arrangement has several advantages including the provision of opportunities for students to carry an additional subject within the regular daily and weekly time limitation.
— oOo— The author is Principal of San Roque Dau 1st National High School, San Roque Dau 1st, Lubao, Pampanga