By Adarsh Burela
Lunch is over, the bell rings, and you take your seat in your fifth period. It’s not a Wednesday, so you begrudgingly wait for the period to start. Unfortunately or fortunately for you, you have a solid 20 mins of nothing but reading or free time to spend as you please. Sustained Silent Reading (SSR), the use of which is ambiguous, and though on the surface may seem like a well-thought idea – giving students a portion of their school day to have time to read, which they rarely get in their day to day life – it is rarely used for its true purpose. Perhaps the implementation of SSR as a whole is the issue.
Having reading time at all seems like a generally unproductive use of time. Yes, high school students lack time to read on their own free will. What reading they do is largely dependent on their English class, which is by no means ideal seeing as students should have the chance to read what they want and still be part of the academic curriculum. By law, schools are required to allot time for a period in which students are allowed to read. By the same jurisdiction,any student who did not bring their own reading material for the time. Both rules are loosely followed at MHS to no fault of the students. There was a point where all students and staff would stop what they were doing and just read, but as time progressed and school became more competitive, students seem to have deemed other things more important.
The most common use of time for students during SSR would be for homework; last minute homework for either the fifth or sixth period, last-minute studying for a test coming up, or getting ahead for the workload at home. While these are usually great things, this leaves absolutely no time for students to have where they can read on their own peacefully. Without being required to, many students will not read – there are more pressing things in their minds.
SSR as a whole feels like a time for any other topic than for reading. Sleeping in class is a common sight during SSR and for good reason. Students may have been stressed, stayed up too late doing one thing or another, utterly bogged down by their workload, or just plain tired -what better time to catch up on well-needed rest than a time where you can’t get in trouble for it? ASB’s events, including CLOG Committee, Campus beautification, and Spirit Counting, do not get their own time because SSR is the most interruptible time period where students aren’t doing much. These can feel like interruptions to what should have been a quiet time to oneself.
Giving students the ability to make up work during lunch or SSR or ask teachers questions is absolutely useful, but labeling it as a time for reading is misleading. Seeing as it is so unstructured, most implementations of SSR fail to provide students with time to actually read. Moving it to another period, or giving students the choice to move to another designated classroom for an actual reading time whilst still managing time for other students and their needs might be better options the school could look into implementing.