The Calhoun School, a private school in New York City’s Upper West Side, was featured June 1 in the New York Times as it completed its first year on a block calendar.
Steven J. Nelson, Calhoun’s head of school, told the Times the new schedule fostered teaching in the ways children learn best. “Most of the activities that create the neuron connections in brains which lead to higher-level academic research and achievement are things that require time and space and experiential education,” he said. “These are things that are privileged by a block system.”
Times reporter Jenny Anderson wrote that the schedule came about after five years of trying to accommodate “maddeningly complex schedules” and “became a sort of evangelical mission to make progressive education more, well, progressive: embracing depth over breadth, allowing for more experiential learning in Central Park and at nearby museums, and, administrators said they hoped, reducing stress.”
This should sound familiar to Cornellians, who have taken classes under the block calendar, known as One Course At A Time (OCAAT), since 1978. At the college level, OCAAT allows students to acquire knowledge in the most appropriate setting, where the excitement of generating or using knowledge is at its highest. That might mean studying Spanish in Argentina, Renaissance art in Italy, archeology in Greece, meditation in India, or tropical insects in Costa Rica.
The story noted that private high schools are moving toward longer classes, and Patrick F. Bassett, head of the National Association of Independent Schools said, “I’ve never heard of anyone going back to a traditional schedule, not once.”
Added Daniel Isquith, a math teach at Calhoun, “Once you live in this and get a sense of pacing, it’s incredible what you can accomplish in terms of real actual understanding versus proficiency.”