There are 525,600 minutes in one year, and 75,600 of those minutes are spent in just one school year alone. Is it really crucial to spend each one of those minutes teaching, or is there time to spare?
Principal Donnie Bartlett has put a phrase into teachers and students heads, “bell to bell.” Bartlett is encouraging teachers and students to make the best use of their time in every class and especially the classes that only meet every other day. The hour and a half could be crucial to meet every students’ needs when it comes to learning sometimes tedious material in higher level classes.
Some teachers don’t make the best use of their time in the hour and a half that they have with their students and fill it in with “busy work.” Some teachers over compensate with wasting their time in class and give countless worksheets to fill in our time at home. Some teachers don’t realize what actually helps students learn. Things that helps us learn are things such as projects and guided readings. A worksheet that we can find on the internet with the key doesn’t help us learn. Likewise, a common question discussed between friend groups is, “Do I really need to know this?” By the time we walk into high school as a freshman, it is easy for us to weed out what is and isn’t absolutely crucial for our learning. We realize if a teacher is being consistently lazy in a class and more than likely we will be lazy for them. Monkey see, monkey do.
It’s easy to get caught up in our daily schedules. Wake up, go to school, go to our said after school activity, come home, do homework and go to bed. At some point we stop wanting to learn and just want to finish our homework because we are exhausted from our daily schedules.
Is it worth our time putting in sometimes hours of our effort into a worksheet that a teacher just assigned to fill in a hole in Home Access Center? Probably not. Is it worth our time to sit there and play Game Pigeon games for an hour and a half because our teacher is more than likely doing the same on their phone? Probably not. Is it worth our time to only come to school just to take notes, but never put our knowledge to use? Probably not.
The best way to stop this annoyance students face is to put an end to wasting our time. Most of the students in the building are here to learn and want to succeed for their teachers. The students want to be the very best they can be when they put their knowledge to test come their AP, SAT, ACT, STAAR or any other standardized tests. Students may have to be here because of the law, but we learn because of choice. We challenge ourselves by choice. We dream of a higher level of education by choice. We need to be prepared when it comes to that higher level of education, and it is our teachers job to prepare us for it.