As the school year winds down, students and teachers are gearing up for finals. I sat down with Mr. Mayanscik, a 15 year teacher, to get his thoughts on the block schedule used in our school for finals week. With three years of experience at Atascadero High School, he’s had a chance to see the system in action.

“The block schedule works really well for a hands on subject like science because in science you do labs and having a 50 minute period precludes a lot of the things that you could do because you can’t set up, do the things, and then break it down in a 50 minute period. And so, we don’t get to do some of the labs that we would normally do because time is short. So we do other things to fill their places”

He noted that not all subjects benefit equally from this format. “…but I’ve heard the opposite for classes like math, where you need everyday practice for subjects in order to master them and to build those long term connections.”

““I would much rather have a block schedule because we could do so many more things that are exploratory. The push in education, especially in science is ‘here’s an idea, figure it out’. We can’t figure stuff out in a short amount of time, you need time to make mistakes and to process it and try new things, you can’t do that in 50 minutes.”

When I asked about finals week in terms of stress level, Mr. Mayanscik replied, “Finals are easy for me, I’ve already written my test. The hard time is the week before finals. I need to make sure all my grades are done, I gotta talk to all the parents and gotta make sure my tests are set up. That’s the hard week. Finals week is super easy for me, I just sit back, give the test, because I do a google form it autogrades, super easy. I guess the hardest part is the kids who come up afterwards and need half a percentage point to get their grade bumped up. It’s hard sometimes to tell kids no.”

As I wrapped up our chat, I couldn’t help but appreacite Mr. Mayanscik’s insight. His take on block scheudling offers a valuable perspective on what work and what doesn’t work in our education system.