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Comment by pwthornton | Hacker News Reader

There is a way to have time to cover Calculus in high school while still taking it slower: Block scheduling.

My high school shifted to it. It's like a college day where you have four longer classes instead of eight shorter ones. Courses are semester-long, not year-long. This means you can take two math classes in one year (algebra in the fall and geometry in the spring).

This also enabled my high school to offer AP Calculus B, which is part-two of AP Calculus.

The other advantage of this type of schedule is that it is also easier to offer other kinds of math that may be more critical to most students, such as a dedicated class on statistics.

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Our school district has a program where teenagers can elect to go to high school at a local community college. Depending on their aptitude going on, the program starts them off on high-school level classes and moves them up to college-level classes as the semesters go on, and all of this happens on a real college campus with a real college workload and schedule. The idea is that the kids aim to graduate with at least an associates degree.

Poor grades and trouble-making will get you kicked out of the program, so the only kids that are there are the ones who WANT to be there, which is a drastic contrast to actual high school.

Our daughter will be attending this school in the fall, we are all very excited about it.

My HS one of the first to have block scheduling. I would say the only negative about it was the AP/IB exams were held in early May. The high school year ended early June. So, there was a mad scramble to cram for the AP classes you took in the fall and a scramble to cover topics in 4 months instead of 5 (80% of a normal semester) for the spring semester.

If I could do it again I probably would have focused on getting the required classes out the way in the fall and focus on the AP in the spring to prepare for the exam in May.

That's what my high school did. 4 block periods per day. We had "A" days and "B" days. A days were 1st, 3, 5th, and 7th period. B days were 2nd, 4th, 6th, and 8th period. I never had two math classes in the same semester though.

My Toronto high school was like this, back in the early 2000s.

My Colorado high school was also like this, same time frame.

Eight different classes in one day? How can that work?

When I was in high school, IIRC we did 55 minute classes with 5 minutes between classes, 4 core classes 2 or 3 electives + lunch. It doesn't work, by time you start, the class settles, late arrivals show up, homework is collected, questions asked and whatnot, there's probably only 30 mins of real instruction. Class would boil down to either teaching or worksheets but not both.

Yes, this is the rub, it's not very efficient. For deeper activities, block scheduling is radically superior. Hell gym is way better too!

So my school did block schedule of 90 minutes classes on alternating days. But I am wondering if 30 minutes of instruction is about right?

I mean a lot of evidence point to people having difficulty focusing on a single thing or learning for more than 20 minutes at a time? 30 minute bite-sized lessons might be perfect.

Not well.

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