As the end of the quarter approaches, anchor day after anchor day passes by. Your teachers all declare at some point that one period will be a catch-up day, an opportunity to manage the Jefferson workload with no new assignments. You take a moment to relax, but your time is consumed by completing work for other classes that don’t have a catch-up period.
When catch-up periods are spread thin across multiple weeks, the full impact of a catch-up day is lost. Instead, students get brief opportunities to relax interspersed with the hectic, work-filled classes that an anchor day typically comprises. Some departments also schedule important projects to coincide with anchor days, contending that they cannot require students to work on those projects during the catch-up day, but that they strongly recommend it. This only increases student stress and reduces the benefits that a catch-up day would otherwise provid,e such as giving everyone time to breathe, allowing a space to clarify questions and delegating work productively rather than cramming.
If the date of every catch-up day were the same for all departments and courses, it would also be easier for students and teachers to schedule their task completion for the longer term. In the status quo, students often don’t know when their catch-up period will be until a few days before it happens. This uncertainty prevents efficient scheduling and encourages last-minute cramming, which is already a prevalent issue at Jefferson. If catch-up days were standardized, their date wouldn’t have to be a surprise—diligent students would have the option to plan how to use that time in advance. Anxiety and burnout around the end of the quarter could drastically decrease as well.
Some supporters of allowing departments to choose the date of their catch-up day argue that more flexibility is convenient for teachers. Standardized catch-up days actually solve this issue, though, because they redistribute work so that grading is spread out. For example, not every department can schedule a test immediately after the catch-up day because they have to comply with student advocacy rules about the number of summatives in one day. If summatives are fairly distributed after catch-up days, students have less of a burden to complete a large number of assignments in a short time, and teachers benefit the same way with grading. Right now, there is no incentive or awareness to spread summatives out, but a shared catch-up day encourages communication for the better.
As we look into future Jefferson schedules, we should remember that it’s not about the catch-up day itself, it’s about how you use it. Standardized catch-up days would allow both students and teachers to use the allotted time more effectively, and at Jefferson, a little more time can reduce a whole lot of stress.