By Sydney Simpson – Staff Reporter

Most high schools across the country incorporate an advisory period into their schedules in order to teach students moral values, and Jonathan Law High School is no exception. Every E and F day in the letter day cycle at Law contains an advisory or common time period that lasts for 33 minutes. Advisory is only held on the first block day of each month, and every block day after that has what is known at Law as common time, a free period for students to visit teachers, retake tests, or just to get work done in general. 

Both advisory and common time are very beneficial for all students, but 33 minutes is simply not enough time. Common time periods need to be longer due to students needing more time to get their work done and more time to visit teachers in order to get extra help, especially since a majority of students are student athletes or have other extracurricular activities that leave them with minimal after school time to get these things done.

Common time only comes around at Law twice every six school days, and for some students, this can be the only time that they have to get their work done, which is why it needs to be longer than 33 minutes. A majority of students at Law are student athletes, and practices for after school sports can be up to three hours long every day. These practices make kids tired, and the last thing they want to do when they get home is complete three or more hours of homework. If practice is located at Law and ends at 6 p.m., some students may not get home until 6:30 p.m. Once they get home, they have to take a shower, eat dinner, and spend time with their families in order to keep family relationships intact. Some students also have other home responsibilities such as chores that can take a considerable amount of time every day to do. Each student also has up to eight classes in which they need to maintain their grades in in order to be eligible to continue playing sports at Law or making honor roll at the end of each quarter.

According to a poll done by the University of Phoenix, high school students spend up to three and a half hours each night on homework. When you combine this with sports and attending school during the day, kids can often be awake until midnight on a school night, leaving them with only six hours of sleep and damage to their health.

If a longer common time during school was offered, it would give students the opportunity to get more of this work done during school so that they are not up all night trying to be prepared for class the next day. Some will say that a longer common time is not needed because some kids who are not student athletes have plenty of time after school to get work done, but just because kids do not participate in sports at Law, does not mean that they do not participate in any extracurricular activities or outside sports. There are various clubs and other after school activities offered at Law that take up a student’s free time after school such as Unified Sports, Key Club, and Model U.N.

Also, students may participate in outside sports that can take up a lot of their free time as well. For example, Sophomore Emma Nelly is a three sport athlete at Law, and on top of this, she practices gymnastics at Cartwheels for two or more hours every day. Even if she did not participate in Law sports, her schedule would still be full, leaving her with almost no time for homework. An extension of the common time period would be beneficial to Nelly along with all other students who participate in sports or extracurricular activities and have minimal time after school to get their homework done. 

Some students need extra academic help in order to keep good grades, and they can do this by staying after school with a teacher in order to ask questions and get help on assignments. The only problem is, some students are not able to stay after school due to other commitments, and some teachers also are not able to stay after school for too long to help students excel in their classes with this extra teaching time. Many kids play sports and participate in extracurricular activities which leaves them with no time to stay after school and get extra help. Also, some teachers coach sports and have to leave their classrooms right after the last bell rings in order to get ready for practice. This leaves common time as the only time that students at Law can go to visit their teachers and ask questions to help them understand a topic that they may be struggling to learn. The time provided for common time is not enough time for all students to get the help they need, because a teacher may be busy with one student for all of common time, while another student also might need help from that teacher.

People may argue that students have ample time to get extra help, and that they can utilize their study periods in order to talk to their teachers, but what these people fail to realize is that not every student has a study period in their schedule, and a lot of the time, teachers have other classes during a student’s study period and are unavailable to help because they are teaching. Common time periods should be extended to 58 minutes long, the same amount of time as a regular period. If this extension were to happen, six minutes would have to be taken away from each block period, which is not that drastic of a change. The block periods would still be significantly longer than regular periods, with 75 minutes rather than the standard 81. A longer common time period would benefit students who are struggling in school tremendously by allowing them enough time to get the help that they need.

Although common time is a great asset for students, it would be even more beneficial if the period dedicated to it were longer. It would help all students to get their work done and get the extra academic help they need to excel in school.