While block scheduling offers numerous benefits for students, Those against block scheduling suggest it may negatively affect students’ skills, especially if a student struggles in a particular subject area.
Let us look at this issue with regard to a high school mathematics class, though this can be extended to any class. Many people find math challenging as it can be extremely abstract. If a student has minimal skills in math, he or she is going to have a difficult time completing any math class. This difficulty is exacerbated by block scheduling.
A student is scheduled to take math in the fall semester of his/her sophomore
year, so the student is not scheduled to take a math class in the spring of his/her sophomore year. Then, summer rolls around, and a couple of months later, a student returns to school for his or her junior year and is not scheduled to take math until the spring semester of his/her junior year.
It would be difficult for a student who is proficient in math to recall the concepts that he or she learned over a year ago, as many of the mathematical concepts one learns are not something that he or she uses every day.
While a student who is proficient in math will have difficultly recalling those concepts that were taught a year ago, such recollection is detrimental to a student who has minimal skills. Students who struggle need to be scheduled for math in consecutive semesters so that they will not forget what he/she has already learned.
Doing so would ease the amount of frustration that the student feels as well as the amount of stress that this places on the teacher. Scheduling a student for math in consecutive semesters may improve the number of
concepts that a student is able to retain, thereby decreasing the knowledge gap the student will otherwise experience.
Students who are minimal in one area or another may benefit from having seven periods a day—but then again, students at most schools do not have a voice as to what scheduling format they prefer.