It’s hard enough for Williston students to attend Saturday classes every other weekend, but this year, the calendar has two consecutive weekends of Saturday classes in October.
For the past 10 years, Williston has run on a two-week rotating schedule. There are classes six days a week (blue weeks) for one, and there are classes 5 days a week (green weeks) for the other. Due to the way things fall in the calendar this year, the month of October will have two green weeks in a row and then two blue weeks in a row.
The week of Sept. 30, which lead into long weekend, was a green week. When students return from the long weekend, there will be a three-day-long green week. Then, the week of Oct. 14 and the week of Oct. 21 will be blue weeks with classes on Saturday Oct. 19 and Oct. 26. The normal alternating schedule will resume starting the week of Oct. 28.
The blue and green week schedule exists so that each class period is allotted an equal amount of time over the course of two weeks. Although Saturday classes can seem preposterous to people who are unfamiliar with boarding school, it is important to recognize that Wednesdays are half days due to afternoon athletic competitions. Therefore, Saturday classes make up for the time lost on Wednesdays.
Kimberly Polin, Academic Dean at Williston, explained the reasoning and history behind blue and green weeks.
Before 2013, Williston “had numbered periods instead of lettered periods” and “six periods instead of seven,” Polin said.
At that time, classes still met every other Saturday, but it looked a little different than it does today. One week of Saturday classes would be blocks one, two, and three, and the other week of Saturday classes would be blocks four, five, and six.
The transition to the current schedule occurred due to the large number of seemingly unavoidable challenges that the academic office was seeing. For example, if a student was taking AP Biology and AP Psychology, and both classes fell during the same block, they wouldn’t have been able to take both of the courses they wanted. To fix this, they incorporated an extra block to allow for more flexible scheduling, also giving students two free blocks instead of one.
The last time that there were two weeks of Saturday classes back-to-back occurred in October of 2018. The calendar for this October is arranged so that one blue week and one green week switch places. There will still be the same amount of Saturday classes, but instead of alternating, there will be two consecutive green weeks and two consecutive blue weeks.
Brendan Capshaw, a six-year senior day student from Southampton, Mass., explained that in his time at Williston, he does not recall having a double blue week. He missed the most recent occurrence of this by just one year. Brendan is not happy about this change in schedule.
“I’m quite disappointed… My sleep schedule is gonna be messed up and, I’m not looking forward to it,” he said.
Alternatively, Grace McCullagh, a senior boarder from Cambridge, Mass., prefers blue weekends to green weekends.
She explains that she is not looking forward to the upcoming double green weekend “because [with] so much downtime on the weekends [you] kinda like lose motivation and lose a rhythm for the weekend and then Mondays are the worst,” she said.
Students, faculty, and probably most members of the community do not want to attend Saturday classes for two weeks in a row, but many people are quick to jump to complaining instead of understanding the reasoning behind this scheduling rearrangement.
Polin explained that there are many reasons behind this anomaly, including the timing of the fall long weekend and Jewish holidays, as well as visitors to campus, who would like to see Saturday classes.
Compromises are challenging because there are always going to be downsides for one group or another, but it is important to be flexible. She wants to remind people that others have survived this before and “it will all be okay.”
