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How the New Monday Schedule is Affecting CTE Programs By Riley Clarke
As a second-year culinary student, my class period is a double block, being about three hours on a normal day, but on a Monday? Only ninety minutes. You might be thinking, wow, ninety minutes? That’s a lot. But in reality, it actually isn’t.
I’m sure that by now we’re all aware of the new Monday schedule, where we have all of our classes for forty-five minutes at a time and our periods change based on the order of the rotation set in advance by administration. I know that many people (students in particular) are frustrated with this new schedule, mainly because of the short time frame and not being given enough time to finish lessons or because you have to do all of your homework before Monday. Whatever the reason is, a lot of people aren’t taking a liking to our new schedule. But I would like to bring up another problem completely: how this new schedule affects the CTE programs and classes.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with how CTE programs work, they are classes based in our Regional Career and Tech Center that help students learn about different careers and teach them the skills necessary to work in their chosen fields. Coventry High School alone has twelve CTE programs, with many students in our school being involved in at least one of the aforementioned twelve programs. Most of our programs are four-year programs, and for most programs, years two through four have double blocks, meaning that the class will take up two class periods in your schedule, which is where our problem starts.
As a second-year culinary student, my class period is a double block, being about three hours on a normal day, but on a Monday? Only ninety minutes. You might be thinking, wow, ninety minutes? That’s a lot. But in reality, it actually isn’t. With the lack of time, there isn’t much our teachers can do to really teach us like they normally would. The schedule splits up our double blocks so that we no longer have those ninety minutes to do our jobs and gain experience. Those forty-five minutes are barely enough to learn anything, much less actually retain it.
Our Monday classes have become: get changed, take attendance, work for maybe twenty minutes, clean up, get changed again, get to the next class on time, and repeat again next Monday. I don’t know who that’s benefitting, but it’s not benefitting those of us in CTE programs.
This has become a problem when our classes need us to be dedicated and work hard to complete the tasks assigned to us, but how can we even attempt to complete them when we don’t have the time?
CTE classes aren’t like your typical math or science classes, where it’s just a paper assignment that you can finish at home later. Our work involves things that take time and effort that can’t always be done at home. It isn’t helping us to just stop in the middle of our work to get ready to go to the next class.
But before I could do that, I decided to talk to others so I could get a grasp on how others in CTE programs felt about this new schedule and how it affected their CTE program. I ended up with results that remained about the same every time: the CTE students I talked to don’t like the Monday schedule as it affects their programs and classes.
The questionnaire asked three questions: Do you feel that the Monday schedule affects how a class works in your program? Do you feel that CTE programs are negatively affected by the Monday schedule? And what are your personal feelings on Monday’s schedule regarding the CTE programs?
Out of the thirteen anonymous students I surveyed, most felt that yes, their work was impacted negatively by the changes in the Monday schedule, while only a small percentage of students disagreed with that assumption.
When asked if they felt that CTE programs, in general, were impacted negatively, 69.2% of the students believed that it does impact them and their CTE classes. 15.4% of those students felt that the Monday schedule does not impact their CTE classes, 7.7% felt that Monday possibly impacted their CTE classes, and the other 7.7% were undecided on the matter.
Outside of the multiple choice portion of the survey, I included a short-answer question where the students could anonymously tell me their personal opinions on the schedule and how it affects their CTE classes.
Some of the responses I got ranged from “It makes me mad and it makes me want to cry” to “I don’t mind it and it makes an easy first day of the week”, but there were a few of the responses that stood out to me personally.
“CTE classes are the only classes I enjoy and with them being shorter and with so many periods in one day it gets really tiring.”
“I dislike it, and feel as if I can’t get any real work done during the day.”
“It’s annoying that it splits into the period and affects my work ethic.”
“As a culinary student, I think the Monday schedule affects us the most. We are a running restaurant and due to Mondays, we can not be open. Due to the short class period, we are unable to get a lot done in the kitchen. It also gives us less time to change into and out of our uniforms. This can make us late to our other classes, and unless we are given a pass, we are marked late.”
To me, those responses show how much this schedule can affect those of us in CTE programs. It’s no longer about trying to fit all of our classes into one day, it’s about how our programs are being affected and no one is saying anything about it. I hope this article helps spread awareness of this issue.