When you go to school, you are expected to go to each class, listen to the teacher and learn. But for the school’s half days, that is not the case. Half days are unproductive. During half days, students are in their classrooms for 28-30 minutes per class, which is not enough time to do meaningful work. 

When the bell rings for the next class to start, your teacher has to take attendance, explain the directions for the day and get students to do their work. However, by the time they’re finished, class will already be over. Students don’t feel like they can be productive in twenty minutes and only if the teachers assign real meaningful work. Some teachers don’t assign meaningful work on half days and instead, just give out coloring sheets or watch movies. 

On half days, do we really come to school to learn, or do we come to school so that we can count it as a full day? It seems as if half days are more about having a mental break and socializing rather than learning.

Even if the work is meaningful, some students can’t find themselves to be productive.  

“We don’t really do anything in my classes for half days. They are work days, but nobody actually does anything,” junior Zac Rogozinski said. 

On days when we are required to spend time with our mentees, nothing productive seems to happen there either. Unorganized chaos creates futile bonding activities and bonding time. For example, when the school first started the buddy system, some students got to pick their buddies while other students were automatically assigned a buddy they had to be partnered with regardless of students’ personal opinions.  

On the first day of the new buddy system, students got to know their mentee or mentor. However, even after getting to know their buddy, some people still had to find different buddies due to the fact that boys had to be with boys and girls had to be with girls. This caused another day of unproductive bonding activities and bonding time, as well as a ton of confusion and frustration in the school.

“I feel like it is beneficial to certain kids but to the high schoolers it is a waste of time and we should not need to wake up on half days when we don’t actually learn anything that day but instead we do activities that mean nothing to us,” senior Kegan Collins said.

We have nine half days throughout the year, so that’s nine wasted days. A solution to solving these problems is to use one of the days we have completely off or use one of the days we use for our breaks and just make it a normal school day to make up for the 4 days. The other half day that we miss out on is the last day of school which is also final exams which makes for a productive half day.