Administrative Considerations controlling Length of the Class Period
When recommending variations in the program we collide with what may seem at first to be an insuperable difficulty. It is impossible from an administrative point of view to have class exercises of irregular lengths. Imagine what would happen if the mathematics teacher should dismiss his class after a recitation of twenty-seven minutes, and the Latin teacher should hold his for fifty-three minutes. For administrative reasons class periods must be measured by the clock.
This leads to certain absurdities in school organization. For example, in order to regularize credits in high schools a unit of credit has been defined as a certain number of hours of class work. A moment’s consideration makes it perfectly clear that an English class consisting of thirty freshmen will do less intensive work in a forty-minute period than will an advanced senior class of four students in trigonometry. The administrative fiction of uniformity when like credit is given for these two classes is grotesque.
The assignment of a double period to laboratory classes is likewise a concession to administrative convenience rather than a carefully weighed arrangement. It is easier to make up periods in multiples of the standard recitation time. But it is by no means clear that the sciences can profitably use double periods. The internal adjustment of laboratory work needs more careful study than it has received in the past. The laboratory method, as shown in an earlier chapter, is one which has excited great enthusiasm. Many a laboratory assignment which does not fill the time allotted to it is tolerated because of the vague general enthusiasm for the method and the formal arrangement of double periods.