Thursday evening, six fifteen. After struggling through four days of classes, you feel pretty good about yourself. You just got home after a long day of listening in class, trying not to fall asleep, turning assignments in, perhaps sports practice. At which point you realize that you have to do homework for every single class on your overloaded Blake schedule. Sleep will have to wait until tomorrow.

This common scenario is an unfortunate and direct result of our block schedule. Simply put, who enjoys or appreciates having all of their classes on Friday? The forty-five minute blocks feel downright skimpy compared to the sixty-five minute long blocks, making it difficult to have classes which feel productive.

Because of these short blocks, Fridays become a race from class to class, accumulating homework without learning much. Additionally, after four days of not sleeping and stressing out over tests, essays, quizzes, unannounced homework checks, practically nobody is rested enough to do anything.

The main challenge of the day isn’t paying attention in class and appropriately dominating whatever assessments teachers have schedule. It’s making it through block five without visibly dozing off.

Nobody can deny that the Blake experience is stressful. Our education is at great monetary expense to our families, expectations are sky-high, competition impossible to avoid. So why is it that our schedule appears to have been designed to make us even more stressed? Having all of our classes on Friday helps nobody.

From the student perspective, having all the classes on Friday makes the end of the week unnecessarily demanding. From a classroom productivity perspective, the students are exhausted after not sleeping Thursday night, rendering any progress in class questionable.

So, why do we have all of our classes on Friday? Why don’t we instead have only some of our classes on Friday, a situation in which Thursday night homework would be less demanding, enabling students to arrive at school rested and ready to work? It would only make sense.