This past year, a committee of faculty members spent months crafting an updated version of our daily academic schedule. Now, the Choate community finds itself with a brand-new routine. While I believe that some of these updates have created positive change, others have only produced more problems.
The crown jewel of the new schedule, in my opinion, is the 15-minute later start to the academic day. As someone who wakes up as late as humanly possible, any additional sleep is much appreciated. Unfortunately, not everyone is in agreement with me: Shaylah Finnerty ’25 said that the new schedule doesn’t really change anything for a day student like herself, whose wake-up time is determined by her parents’ morning plans. Even many boarders, who don’t struggle with commute times, agree with her. “I just don’t understand what the fifteen minutes are doing,” Emma Bowles ’25 said. “It just makes all the start times weird.”
My second favorite change is the five minutes shaved off the end of every class. While many students may construe the shortened class times as shorter exam periods, I believe the hastened arrival of the weekend as you count down the minutes until 3:20 p.m. on Friday makes it all worth it.
I have also found myself thoroughly enjoying the new weekly advising block. This new, built-in component of our schedule has successfully kept me in contact with my adviser more than ever before. Though creating a special block for advising meetings makes it feel more like a class than a time to forge relationships, I know I would have been grateful for the consistency of our current system during my freshman year.
However, while I appreciate the later start, shorter classes, and weekly advising block, I am not a fan of the extended lunches. To make this adjustment possible, we had to lose, among other things, our Thursday conference block. Though these periods in the day are usually too short to serve their original purpose — getting extra help or meeting with one’s adviser — they did give students a sacred moment of relaxation. When evenings are consumed by writing papers, running clubs, and practicing sports, we need as much unscheduled time throughout the school day as we can get.
Wednesdays now have a similar problem as well. Before, Wednesdays were the low-stress half days, with a student programming period separating the first two periods from the third. Now that this block has been moved to the end of the academic day, all three Wednesday classes are back-to-back. This leaves many of us with three classes in a row on both Wednesdays and Thursdays.
While it may have been easy for me to identify all of the things I dislike about our new schedule, I do recognize the difficulty behind renovating an entire system, especially one that suits the needs of the entire student body and faculty. So, while our gripes are understandable, we need to respect the hard work of those who completed this near-impossible task.
