Second Issue: Asynchronous Bells

My main overall goal is to lessen the amount of chaos that is present in urban school systems. The first way to do that, which I described in a previous post, is to cap each classroom to a max of 20 students. The second way to do that is to eliminate bells.

Visualize this scenario. It's the middle of the day, I'm teaching an 11th grade English class at a not-so-great public high school, and a bell rings. This bell is not for my students. It is for different students and it is signaling that it is time for them to go to lunch. My class now completely loses concentration as they watch their friends walking by, heading off to social time. Suddenly my students decide that this is the time when they urgently need to use the restroom. They cannot refrain from poking their heads into the hallway to say something to their friends or siblings. I cannot fully regain control of the classroom until the halls have cleared.

Having bells ringing asynchronously is detrimental to student learning, as it presents an unnecessary disturbance. If every bell sounded in the school throughout the day was meant for every student, this would lessen the chaos. I'll take it a step further and propose that bells be eliminated completely. It would take some creativity to pull this off, but I have some recommendations that I will suggest in my next blog to make this idea work.