WHY DOES SCIENCE GET "MORE TIME"

There is probably $300,000 worth of equipment in the science department. Fortunately, the school didn't get hung up with the belief that to be fair, it had to provide the history department with matching funds. That would be dumb. The history department doesn't have the need for lab and demonstration equipment on the order of the sciences.

There is tens of thousands of dollars wrapped up in the booth and lighting system in Garland Auditorium. Again, fortunately, there was no discussion amongst administrators when making those outlays about giving comparable funds to the math department. The arts (and the events that regularly live in the Garland space) had a need that the other departments didn't have, so the school acted appropriately.

It cost well over a half million dollars to renovate the football field several years ago. Again, a special need satisfied by the school.

Even if these numbers are off some, the point is that the school has a long history of identifying situations big and small that are special, that are not widespread but that are worthwhile, and supporting that need with money or time or whatever is necessary to make the wheels turn appropriately.

If you go by the standards set nationally, an Honors Physic class covers kinematics, Newton's Laws, energy considerations, momentum, rotational motion, electrostatics, circuits, magnetism and magnetic induction. It is a full year worth of academics.

That is, it takes just as many hours for an Honors Physics teacher to cover that curriculum as it does a U.S. History teacher to cover the U.S. History curriculum,, or a Spanish III teacher to cover the Spanish III curriculum, or a Calc AB teacher to cover the Calc AB curriculum.

In other words, just as is the case with everyone else, science needs four days a week (using the 2015-16 daily schedule) for a full year to get through the material our kids are expected to master if the school wants to claim that its students have taken a year-long Honors Physics course.

The problem, and what makes science "special," is that we have this other thing we are mandated to do. We have to additionally provide a laboratory experience. If we don't do that, we can't call the course a lab course, and if we don't do that, we don't get UC approval. We also don't get science certification for our science classes from any other university in the nation. THAT is why we have the fifth day of class for science, to take care of the lab requirement with which we are saddled.

And for those who think this phenomenon is special to Poly, it isn't. Even at the university level, the academics of a physics course does not include time for lab. Labs are taken care of in an entirely independent course. In fact, you can even take the lab class associated with, say, Newtonian Mechanics, in a semester other than the one you use to take the academic course. LAB IS EXTRA!

Still, it isn't uncommon to get unsympathetic souls who say the science program at Poly should just cut down and make the labs fit into a four-day schedule. The down-side to that is that it would mean cutting a quarter of the academic class away (one day per week) to make room for the lab component. And the problem with that, obviously, is that in doing so we would be making the class into something other than an Honors Physics course (it would no longer meet the coverage standard), another killer for university accreditation. But more to the point, think about how willing a history teacher would be to cut a quarter of his or her curriculum (and about how that would affect what that teacher was trying to do for his or her students educationally).

So as irritating as it is, this is why every scheduling committee (as of the writing of this piece in 2014) that has looked at the daily schedule in the last forty years (along with the original one that put together Poly's first daily schedule) has afforded science one more period with students per week, complete with the homework possibility that that extra time affords. It isn't "extra time." It is simply the amount of time that is needed for the science department to do what it has been mandated to do.