With students in school at full capacity, less clamoring about zoom links and wifi problems eliminated, the COVID landscape of school is, thankfully, seeming to slowly fade away. But the new 100% capacity scheduling has some negative consequences, one of the worst being the way the school has scheduled our new 100% capacity Wednesday lessons. 

Just as the virtual-Wednesdays were scheduled as half days, so too will the in-person Wednesday school days be shortened, but instead of ending at 12:00 p.m. with a Connections class at 11:40 a.m., the school day ends at 11:00 am, and drops the Connections class. 

Returning to school on Wednesdays was something we have been deprived of for more than a year. I was excited to be able to go back and finally feel a sense of normalcy. 

However, although we are now able to walk the halls of school in person on Wednesdays, we are still not able to appreciate the normalcy of an average day because of how extremely short the day is. 

The new Wednesday class periods are only 41 minutes long, leaving time for only short lessons. It would be easier and safer for students and teachers to continue to learn virtually that day so that we can enjoy longer classes, and not be needlessly exposed to each other.

Connections classes have also been switched from Wednesdays to occurring on different days each week so as to not conflict with the same classes every meeting. Although this is logical, I enjoyed having Connections in the middle of the week, as a sort of break from school to catch up with my classmates and have time to talk about things going on around town or in the world. 

The time of day that we attend Connections has also been switched from the end of the day to the beginning. This cuts into the early part of our day and the academic flow that we have just gotten into. Having Connections at the end of the day is beneficial to both me and other students because it is a period to relax before we have to go back to a world of homework and after-school activities. 

COVID-19 has flipped our world around in ways we have never expected, and has affected our high school experience and molded it into one that we have only seen in movies. Having Wednesdays until 12:00 pm at home was both reassuring and refreshing, with periods with enough time to do work while not having to endure the grueling 80-minute periods like the rest of the week. Wednesdays should continue to be a time of revitalizing for Staples students, so we can keep our stress levels lower in the last stretch of this unique school year.