By Beth Pyne (January 25, 2002)

Count to 6,000. 

This should give you a fairly accurate idea of what high school students at George Mason do, three times daily, with just short breaks in between. I am talking about sitting through classes. Now I hate to sound so negative about school because really that isn't the case. The majority of students are excited about learning and truly desire to be sponge-like receptors of the vast knowledge their teachers strive to impart to them. Nonetheless, one can certainly have too much of a good thing. Such is the case with classes here at our fine educational institution. 

Students simply cannot stay focused for such a long period of time. I personally enter each class with only the sincerest intentions of concentrating on the subject matter for the full block. Yet forty, fifty, sixty minutes through a lecture I find myself becoming drowsy and bored, the dull roar of the teacher drifting into the background and the words on the screen or chalkboard fading into oblivion. However interested I may be in indirect object pronouns preceding plural verbs followed by agreeing articles, but only on Tuesdays when it's raining, or perhaps the economic consequences of decreased pig-iron production in Yemen during the War of 1652, my mind begins to wander. Consequently I have no choice but to find some manner of staying awake and to appear as though I am taking copious notes. I would estimate that I have written the alphabet in at least 84 different fonts and various languages, some of which I have never studied, and filled in all the letter "o's" on no less than 1,634 sheets of paper. I have drawn, colored, and doodled, fidgeted, tapped and twirled. The comparisons that come to mind here are almost endless: a marathon, a black hole, a prison, Chinese water torture, etc. 

Every other student I have talked to agrees with me on this point wholeheartedly. In fact, many teachers do as well. Even the most engaging professor is hard-pressed to captivate the attention of a group of teenagers for an hour and forty minutes. The problem here has little to do with the methods of teaching or the teachers themselves. It is an issue of human nature, which is violated each block when students are asked to sit practically silent and motionless for such an extended period of time. True, there are classes that do not entail lectures for the entire duration. But the difficulties exist even when portions of the block are spent watching films or in group discussion. It is the task of focusing one's mind on a particular subject for so long, albeit one of great excitement, such as the aforementioned Yemen, that slowly wears on a student. One might also say that the purpose of high school is to prepare young people for college, thus classes should be the same length. My response is that at college one does not have three long classes per day, five days a week, fifty two weeks a year, for eons upon eons, as we do here.

A variety of negative consequences result from this system of punishment - I mean classes. Firstly, students experience a feeling of inferiority when they are unable to successfully pay attention throughout the whole period. They are made to believe that they are failing in a sense, when really they are behaving in a perfectly normal fashion. Teachers on the other hand, suffer their own woes as they attribute their students' apparent disinterest to some deficiency on their part. I can tell them honestly that it is nothing personal, we just need smaller doses of them. In addition there are a slew of health related problems that arise out of hundred minute blocks. Many of my compatriots experience back problems and stiff joints, caused by long spells of obligatory inactivity. I for one would be able to perform much better in my athletic endeavors after school if I were on the move more often during the day. Possibly the most tragic outcome of all this is the opportunity it provides for mindless snacking. In such bleak circumstances, carrots and celery provide little relief. A quick study of any classroom will show that chocolate and other sugar-filled foods are the sustenance of choice among high schoolers. Can you blame them? They deserve some pleasant distraction and sweetness as they endure the agonizing ticking of the clock. On top of these appalling effects, long classes also cause such unpleasant habits as nail biting, pencil chewing, head scratching, and hair twirling. 

It is clear that we have before us a grave crisis. Yet the solution is simple. If we want to improve student-teacher relations, self-esteem, attentiveness, productivity, and remedy the threat of American obesity while augmenting the national economy and attaining world peace, we must shorten the length of high school classes at GMHS by twenty-five to fifty percent. In case you're wondering, I did those calculations during my history class.