California passed a law in 2019 that prohibited high schools from starting before 8:30 am. The high school I attended began at 7:25 am, and the one I teach at had a 7:55 am kickoff for a long time, so shifting things backward marked a significant change.
The pandemic delayed enforcement of this policy, but in August 2022, we implemented a newly compliant schedule. Anecdotally, I saw an immediate change: sleeping students during first period became a rarity. I had been skeptical that any change would result, assuming students would push back bedtimes accordingly and render legislative efforts moot, but I was wrong. My observations, limited though they are, suggest this was a valuable, positive move for students.
This doesn’t mean the 8:30 start didn’t have drawbacks. In 2022, our entire schedule shifted back 35 minutes, which meant our release time did as well. Instead of a 3:00 or 3:05 final bell, classes ran until 3:35 pm. Student-athletes, in particular, suffered from this move, as daylight considerations forced many to regularly miss sixth-period classes to finish matches and games before running out of light, but all kids felt it a little bit. They were used to finishing around 3:00; that last half hour felt torturous at first.
The change also impacted teachers. Our contracted day runs until fifteen minutes after the final period, but most remain on campus for extended stretches after that. Student clubs that once ran until 4:00 dragged to 4:30, and test grading no longer wrapped before reasonable dinner times. That pushed-back half-hour bled into the evening with alarming frequency. The post-school period wasn’t demonstrably shorter, but it felt truncated.
Last spring, our principal set about redesigning our schedule. By adjusting our Wednesday late start, condensing our multiple lunches, and lopping off four minutes from each class period, he found a way to vanquish that 3:35 finish so that our last bell could ring at 3:20. This would reclaim fifteen minutes, which might sound minimal, but many believed would make a world of difference. 3:20, they insisted, felt tenable in a way that 3:35 never had.
When our admin team put this proposal to a vote, the change passed overwhelmingly. If I recall, only three or four staff members opposed the move out of more than 130.
I was one of them.
My singular beef harkened back to the forfeited instructional time. Another teacher had shared his calculations with the staff, pointing out that four fewer minutes across each 45-day block would cost every course in every quarter two complete days of instruction. This, I note, means that a 3:20 release time would cost us more than 4% of our instruction.
Granted, those two days would come in four-minute increments. That would seem to be a mitigating factor; our calendars would still look the same. Counterintuitively, though, losing four daily minutes actually did alarm me.
When the pandemic began, I redesigned the structure of my lessons. The motivation for this change was obvious: young people deal with a lot, and stress flows freely among the high-achieving students I teach. I wanted to encourage wellness and endure those challenges. These are great kids, but many adopt a ride-or-die attitude toward their academic performance. With our already chaotic world further upended in 2020 and a college landscape looking more daunting and dire by the day, these young people could benefit from reflection, venting, and coping strategies. I can’t keep them from calculating self-worth from their transcripts, but at least I can demonstrate that other things matter more than their GPA.
For all this issue’s complexity, my new approach to the problem was relatively simple. With exceptions for assessment days and special schedules, I open each lesson with a Question of the Day unrelated to math. In particular, one of those days becomes Therapy Thursday, when the daily question morphs into a time for sharing struggles, talking through turmoil, and letting go of stresses using a free repurposed app.
Adopting this system required an investment of one resource beyond myself: instructional minutes. Instead of opening every class with immediate mathematical practice or a pointed formative assessment, I devote clock time to culture and social-emotional learning. Instead of extra reps, I read out favorite field trips and status checks on elementary school friends. Rather than extend lessons or augment examples, I relay stories about recent breakups and testing anxiety.
Overall, if I average out the time this requires from each block I teach, I always land at an average daily duration of about eight minutes. Pardon my math, but with 37 instructional days per quarter—I remove seven for four whole-period exams and three other itineraries impacted by events—at eight minutes a pop, that sets my classes back 296 minutes of math.
There’s more, though: I devote roughly one entire period per quarter in every class I teach toward something not specifically mathematical. One full day becomes a miniature port of the Diamond Day social-emotional learning workshop I run, while the other typically centers on an alternative topic around learning optimization and academic health. Factoring those in, my commitment to wellness costs roughly 380 total minutes per quarter per class.
Before the schedule change, when we had 3980 minutes, this total demanded less than 10% of our official time together. Today, with our current bells allotting us merely 3720 minutes, I eclipse that same threshold. I’m devoting more than 10% of my allotted time for teaching Calculus toward not teaching Calculus.
[[ Before you fire off an email to the state superintendent or the College Board, let me remind you that I teach in a state and district where social-emotional learning and student wellness are points of emphasis. What I’m doing is not the norm, but it’s also not some secret that threatens my job. In other states, maybe—but not mine. ]]
I could not have managed this while teaching a complete Calculus course when I first started. Today, in my thirteenth year teaching the course, I am ruthlessly efficient, a true expert in my field delivering streamlined lessons and abundant resources that reflect my vision. It helps, too, that our department runs prerequisite courses that position students for success in Calculus. I can deliver Calculus in a smaller window because our program, from top to bottom, has been overwhelmingly successful; our students take and pass the AP Calculus exams in droves. That success sometimes creates logistical issues even: a student reported last week that our coordinator was pressing a few wavering kids not to test to alleviate the strain on facilities our testing cohort causes.
But.
Yes, there is a but. Depending on your perspective, it might even be a big one.
Since shifting to this structure that champions wellness, mental health, and classroom culture at the expense of some math, my students’ scores have changed.
In particular, my students’ scores have gone down.
Were this not the case, I’d be a national education czar. If my scores trended up alongside this, I’d need a publicist to field all the media inquiries. I wouldn’t need to research literary agents or publishing houses; they’d be coming to me. I wouldn’t have to avert my eyes from my Substack stats; my numbers would rise daily. Everybody would want to know about the teacher who devoted more time to students’ feelings and less to differentiating functions but still got a positive prime from their performance.
To reiterate: I’m not that guy. My overall scores in 2021, 2022, and 2023 have fallen. My pass rate has gone backward; students also earn fours and fives at a slightly lower rate than they did in the pre-pandemic years. I won’t hide from the numbers. I know what they say.
It would be narratively efficient to cast aside all caveats, but I know I can’t. Compelling reasons abound for this performance shift during my era of increased attention on not-Calculus. For one, these years have all been in the shadow of COVID-19, which radically disrupted student learning. My Calculus students last year, for instance, took pivotal prerequisite courses online during a year when the district trimmed classes’ lengths by almost 40% to protect against screen fatigue. Moreover, our district paid for every AP exam for every enrolled student last year. This was a generous gesture, but it also meant many students took an exam that wouldn’t usually. I had one student, for instance, drop my class mid-year due to extenuating circumstances; that student still sat for the test and, naturally, scored the lowest possible score. We still enroll more kids in AP Calculus than any other district site; my students’ scores still beat national and state performance levels by a healthy margin. Maybe this will all be a blip; many people, including staff and students, insist this trend will change.
Nevertheless, acknowledging those facts feels a tad convenient. How easily I can absolve myself of responsibility if I blame COVID and one-year payment programs. But I don’t want to absolve myself; I want to be accountable for my classroom! Internalizing those outside influences robs me of agency. I refuse to do that; it’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me. I refuse to spin in circles, pointing at everything else, even if there’s a modicum of truth in my finger.
Set aside those facts, and I see the situation as follows: I changed the structure of my successful high-level math class, and now my students perform worse than their predecessors did. Demonstrably worse. The biggest thing I control is how I use time; I changed that, and I saw my scores go down.
This fact terrifies me. I say all the right things, and not one administrator has ever brought this to my attention (nor, I suspect, will they). I talk openly about the trend, own it, and I discussed it in formal conferences with my supervisor. I know the humble role I’m supposed to play and the humble words I’m supposed to say about the data and how a teacher’s work can never be reduced to mere numbers, and I celebrate successes with all my usual cheer.
Meanwhile, I’m dying inside. The numbers tear me up. When the scores were released these past three Julys, I stumbled in the aftermath, blasting music as loudly as necessary to stop thinking. Seeing my work, the thing that I’ve spent so much time honing, learning, building, and elevating, rendered down to disappointing digits, is visceral. Those (valid) narratives ring hollow; they are no consolation in the face of quantitative evidence. There’s no accompanying asterisk on the three next to a name I’d projected as a four with a “*But they grew a lot as a person!” footnote in the margins. They’re just numbers.
Ahem.
They’re just numbers that are lower than previous ones used to be.
Teachers grouse about grade grubbing all the time—I’m no exception—but this experience has undoubtedly scaled back my acidity. There’s something about seeing a concrete representation of performance quality that certifies it. Some students want As because their parents threaten to disown them if they earn a B, but many others want high marks to enshrine their goodness in an official capacity. It’s not enough to feel like you did a good job; nobody gets into Stanford or Harvard on positive self-esteem alone. They scratch, whine, and claw for every GPA point so that they have a record saying, “You did enough” and “You were good”. When students sacrifice sleep and peace of mind to excel in school, who can blame them for wanting that effort to shine through on paper? I’ve always craved that paper proof; it’s no surprise I remain that person now.
When I see those scores go down, I can think of a dozen ways I might have made them go up. The most significant way: using more instructional time. Three hundred eighty extra minutes provide a wealth of opportunities! I could do two complete free-response questions weekly and weave in more multiple-choice practice. I could spiral old concepts into less-quick quick quizzes rather than focus exclusively on newer curriculum, or I could do an elaborate warm-up each day. What if I sold out entirely and combined all of that? Free response openings, multiple-choice closings, lectures, and practice in between, with a few extra formal assessments plugged in? That could do it! And hey, I could return to those long afternoon AP review sessions that obligated students to shirk other work to prep for the late May exam assessing a subject they wrapped up before St. Patrick’s Day.
If I put my mind to it, I could do all of this stuff; every idea feels feasible, and I’m confident that when combined with all the rich resources I’ve already implemented, I could reverse the post-COVID cratering. It bears repeating: it’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me. I don’t have to spend 380 minutes on wellness and continue watching those scores go down.
But I’m still going to. I’m still going to let the scores go down if that’s what those 380 minutes cost me.
For the last two quarters, I’ve asked two non-mathematical questions on my final exam. After all the Calculus concludes, I inquire about the rest of the class. The questions have been the same across every class:
(1) What was your favorite part of this class?
(2) What is something you learned about yourself over the course of this quarter?
The former question has been answered now more than 160 times. I’m not going to go back and count, but I’d conservatively estimate that 140 of those students cited some combination of Therapy Thursday, our Question of the Day, and the mini-Diamond Day we did in their answers. Among those who didn’t were several who (flatteringly) said some variation of “You”, which I read as being effectively the same answer. Consensus among any group of 160 should be a pipe dream, but here, there’s a clear consensus on what matters to them, and it runs across performance, age, gender, and mathematical inclination. Even students who admit they rarely shared or responded during these parts of class rave about the experience of hearing raw and (to them) anonymous peers sharing about their lives.
The latter question has also received 160+ responses now, and its contents naturally vary. I intentionally didn’t specify that their answers had to reference learning directly drawn from my class; if their most valuable learning came from their job or the varsity soccer team, that’s great.
Unsurprisingly, though, most students do share specifically what they gained from my Calculus class. They talk about reassessing abilities, altering career trajectories, and renegotiating study strategies, of course—they’re at that age—but many talk about what they’ve gleaned from something personal I said or a response I gave to someone’s Therapy Thursday share. It’s not a monolith, but it’s safely more than half who explicitly reference our wellness work.
“Please write as much as you like and/or have time for,” I prompt them in the instructions, which is to say: I don’t tell them how much to write. Every student that responds earns a point, even if their response is one word. Despite this, the majority of these responses feature prodigious paragraphs. They insist on detailing why these things mattered to them; you can hear the passion as they type these thoughts out in an otherwise silent classroom. It takes me more than an hour to read all this stuff. It takes me days to process it.
Even before I begin interpreting this information’s implications, I can hear the objections (the call is coming from inside the house, after all). This isn’t rigorous! Qualitative responses fundamentally differ from actual performance data. Students like the parts that aren’t hard math? News at eleven. Who’d have thought? There’s nothing actionable here!
Try though I may, I’ll never produce clearer evidence about my students than what the AP score report provides every July. That objective report about a test I didn’t write used to sing my praises; that I need a subjective survey to hear a hum now says a lot. That survey is, ultimately, just noise.
It’s funny, though. I received all those teaching awards for the work I did before 2018. In 2016, 94% of my students passed the AP exam—with a staggering number of takers. On the whole, those students loved me; many of those 2016 groups provided the positive impressions around which I built my entire application. To a one, they said I cared about them and ran through walls to help them succeed. They insisted that I set high expectations and made them want to excel in Calculus.
I didn’t do Therapy Thursday with them. I didn’t greet them at the door, I didn’t squeeze support into our ninety minutes together, and I didn’t regularly remind them that it’s not their grades that make me care about them. It was true, but I didn’t say it; I didn’t offer regular reminders. For that reason, it’s certainly possible that, in the flow of all that math, they justifiably conflated my affection as conditional and labored out derivatives and integrals accordingly. I had so much time with all of them, but the best things they saw in me were almost exclusively extra-textual and extracurricular. They inferred—correctly!—my advocacy, but they stressed over problem sets and AP scores to make sure.
Now, I’m a better teacher. Even when I seethe over the job, I do it better. Instead of mathing to exhaustion as I did before COVID, I keep kindness present in every lesson. There’s no reading between the lines anymore: after disappointing exams, missed deadlines, and sloppily “completed” problem sets, as well as organically during Questions of the Day and Therapy Thursdays, I explicitly endorse what I’d always hoped to imply. “Your score and grade matter less to me than you do as a person.”
That’s the truth. When I look at those scores every July, I’m never disappointed in a student but for them. I’ve let them down; I didn’t do enough. Their scores reflect what I chose to devote our limited time together toward, and their scores have gone down. It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.
But it’s also me waiting at the door to greet them every day. It’s also me counseling them through heartache and pressure even after the alarm sounds. It’s also me modeling emotional awareness and authentic apologies. It’s also me remotely, in the Remind app, responding to college concerns on a Friday night or elaborating upon a Therapy Thursday response during my dinner. It might be me that’s the problem, but maybe I’m solving something else instead.
Wait.
No.
It’s not instead but also. It’s me who designed bountiful Calculus resources for them. It’s me behind the carefully planned instruction, the colorful and thorough lessons, the purposefully written problem sets, the dozens of hours of free video content, and the humor that helps them tolerate everything else. They get that every day, but then, also every day, they get a man who says, “You matter more than your grade or score” in lieu of additional instruction because there’s no better way to prove it’s true than sacrificing some of the former for the latter.
My old students had a teacher who struggled to see beyond the numbers, and that myopia bled into his instruction. My recent students still have that same guy, but for all his quantitative obsession, this version understands that data can diminish him, but it shouldn’t them. This rendition will rip himself over lower scores if it means he’s convinced even one more student not to do the same.
My old students thought they needed $97 numbers to sustain my support, but maybe my recent cohorts know better. Perhaps they believe me when I insist they matter more than the numbers. I’d feel like less of a failure if my students truly believed me.
I want them to believe me. I want to believe they believe me.
If it means they believe me, that’s 380 instructional minutes well spent.
If it means they believe me, I hope the scores stay down.
This piece has so many components that 3000 words are woefully too few. There are ten dozen more paragraphs of self-doubt and dinosaur fears out there; I could fill an entire additional essay with what it was like looking at the complete data from my career teaching Calculus and marveling at how many students those numbers nod to knowing. But I can’t keep expanding the canvas.
Ultimately, this essay speaks to conviction. I want to be a person who can embrace the fact that concrete data does not tell the entire story, but I have to have the conviction to believe in myself and my grander vision when the scores go down. Even after writing this, I’m not there…but I’m closer. That’s how positive change happens.
I know I have noted on your attention to nuance before, but wow! This was impressive in its mathematical specificity and commitment to measuring the effect lost time has on grade scores.
I’m sure you’ve considered this, but I have to ask — do you think that a factor in lower grade scores could actually be about the kids out of school experiences? And be something that is out of your control?
Your Cuddles: Endgame movie and that sneaky Rickroll was a top 3 high school memory for me! It must've been then when I realized "OMG, this guy speaks my language!" 😂 I'd say it's only happened a few times since where I've felt I met someone who shared such a similar wavelength to me. In case you're wondering what my other top two high school memories are, they are that surprise concert by the Plain White T's and all the wacky projects I did with my friends in Ms. Cabanas' English class. Honorable mention goes to that botched field trip where someone dropped their Fitbit into the nuclear reactor.
I had to do a double take when I saw that your high school started at 7:25 am!? I had an 8am class every day last quarter and that nearly took me out. A 7:25 am class would have absolutely destroyed me!