Quentin Livingston
For the 2019-2020 school year, TBLS changed its class schedule and period times to make school start at 8:20 a.m. and end at 2:40 p.m., with eight 43-minute recitations and four-minute passing time in between. With the new schedule, school ends at 3:15 p.m. on Mondays for an advisory sessions for all students after R8. The lunch recitations also changed to R3 and R7, with each being 43 minutes long. This isn’t the first time TBLS changed its schedule. For the 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 school years, school started at 8:00 a.m. and ended at 2:30 p.m., with nine 45-minute recitations and no dedicated passing time. Lunch was also reduced to only 30-minutes happening during R7 and R8 and the extra advisory sessions happened on Tuesdays after school.
TBLS however changed this schedule during the 2018-2019 school year as well. During this period, school started and ended at the same times, but everyday. Advisory still happened on Tuesdays, but recitations were shortened to 35 minutes to make sure school still ended at 2:30. For the rest of the days, recetations lasted only 40 minutes. It was during this year when 4 minute passing time between recitations everyday as well as a 10-minute homeroom class before R1 were introduced. Lunch recitations still had the same length and the same time as before, and the nine recitations remained.
It is also worth noting that during the previous school years, each student would get two study hall periods, called “conclave”, a week in order to get a headstart on the homework for that night or complete any other academic work. It was removed this year however in order to accomodate for the shorter school day. Class I discipulis Nicholas Kochnev commented on the matter: “It sucks that conclave's gone, but I always do homework for other classes in other classes anyway. Starting at 8:20 is great, because now I'm not nearly as late to school, and those extra few minutes of sleep go a long way!"
While discipuli have expressed mixed opinions, they generally sway to a positive attitude on the changes. Class II discipulus Sharon Chen said “Well from the very first time I had heard about it, I was confused and upset for a completely new schedule. However since I got to spend more time within this schedule, I got more used to it and realized that I actually like this schedule more than last year. This year, lunch periods are much more longer, enough time for the kids to get lunch, rather than last year where some kids had to say after lunch to finish eating.” Class I discipulus Sabbir Hossain also said “I feel like not much has changed in particular, and a lot of the changes are actually quite nice such as outside lunch. One thing I don’t particularly like is the removal of office hours, but if I’m being honest I never really went anyway”.
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