Reflections on the New Schedule
By WILLIAM INOUE ‘27
A new school year starts with a schedule loved by some but hated by more.. Throughout the three-month break, which everyone desperately needed, I adjusted to my lifestyle at home where I could sleep whenever I wanted, wake up whenever I wanted, eat whenever I wanted, without the academic stress chasing me to bed and shaking me awake. When school started, I felt like I was jolted awake by the sudden introduction of academic stress. This was made far worse with a new schedule that split lunch into two blocks.
Completing my first year at Phillips Exeter has given me valuable insights into the school’s schedule. Acknowledging and appreciating the monumental task of scheduling all 1,200 students is important. While our criticisms are valid, we must also express gratitude to those who work tirelessly to create the schedule.
The first fundamental thing I realized about the schedule was that it prioritizes athletics over academics. This prioritization is especially obvious in winter when H-Block is added for some sports to happen after lunch. The unjust, cruel, and inhumane H-Block exists partially due to necessity but largely due to the school’s priority of athletics.
The priority can also be seen through the scheduling process. If you are doing a sport this fall term, you will not have G-Block. The reasoning may seem obvious, as sports and G-Block overlap, but it is indisputable that sports are considered first when making the schedule. What this does is that for people participating in a sport, their peers in the class are often the same people every year during that time as they also participate in a sport. This is further evident because PE courses are split into three, depending on the course. Yet, sports are all conjoined into one single time frame, creating at standardized schedule for everyone participating in a sport during the same term. Numerous times, the same people on my athletic team would also be present in my academic classes, and our schedules were often identical. This results in working with the same people in different subjects at school despite us having around three hundred people per grade.
The second fundamental thing I realized was that the school does not prioritize sleep-ins or long breaks. For this term alone, I could move my schedule to three sleep-ins, excluding Wednesdays. Yet the school refuses to give me such a schedule. This single action has made me realize that the flawed schedule is not flawed by design but by intention. We should prioritize sleep-ins over all others. As any Exeter student could relate, sleep is one thing many of us lack and wish we had more.
This term, the academy tried something new: it created a schedule with two lunch periods each day, and the one you were in depended on which long block you had before lunch. In theory, this is a fair attempt to cut down the dining hall lines. It may not be the perfect solution, but seeing the academy try to fix a raging issue is heartwarming. Once Wetherall is built, I am confident we will be able to return to a schedule with only one lunch block.
It is also a worthy time to reflect on the Pilot Schedule given versus the current schedule, similar to last fall term. The Pilot Schedule we tested in the spring, with the ten-minute passing time, gave us ample time to travel across campus and attend each class promptly. I also found the Pilot Schedule to have less homework per day as we had fewer classes each day. While the amount of homework increased, it never surpassed the amount of this term.
The entire schedule idea should not be deemed flawed. We can and should not definitively state that the schedule is flawed without empirical evidence to back it up. We should be grateful for all our schedulers’ efforts to make this schedule for us.
