At the start of second period, announcements are broadcast throughout Building 6 to share information on events, meetings, deadlines and any other pertinent details.
However, due to a number of complications with the current system for announcements, much of this information is not effectively conveyed to the students.
When the intercom comes on, teachers and students may pay close attention to the announcements. As the minutes pass, however, both groups tend to lose focus and engage in idle chatter. Consequently, much of the information is not registered by the students.
Because the daily announcements usually run longer than five minutes, they reduce the amount of time available for second period teachers. In classes that require nearly the entire period to complete a task — such as AP English, when students are writing in-class essays — this reduction can cut into valuable instruction time. In these situations, teachers are sometimes inclined to proceed with their lessons and shut out the announcements altogether.
In addition, because the announcements cover a wide range of news and details, many of the notifications are not relevant to some groups of students. An announcement about graduation gown orders, for example, would be superfluous in the many classes without seniors. Even if the messages apply to them, students may lose attention from the length or difficulty to understand what is being said through the intercom.
All of these complications render the current announcements system ineffectual and excessive. In order to facilitate the dissemination of information, The Feather suggests returning to the announcements setup used in previous years where teachers read the notifications to their classes.
This form of announcements is both practical and engaging. Students are more likely to listen to a teacher speaking directly to them than to an unseen individual talking through a speaker. The students are therefore less likely to talk through the announcements, and will hear what they need to know.
Under this proposed setup, teachers would be able to emphasize the pertinent announcements while skipping the irrelevant ones. For example, in a class with no baseball players, the teacher would ignore a notification about a baseball yearbook photo. Allowing instructors to tailor the announcements to their students would enable them to save time for teaching.
Although this alternative system may have less entertainment value than the current setup, The Feather believes that the reduced duration and more concise presentation would result in a more aware student body.
For more opinions from The Feather staff, read the January editorial, Success in school: The student’s decision.
