Alec Frey ’16: When J-Term ended last month, despite its clear success, the first thing that came to many student, faculty, and administrators’ minds was whether or not January was the best time of the school year to have this two-week experiential learning period. There are many factors that come into play when considering a change in placement, such as exams, weather, and appropriate timing within the actual context of the school year.
For many students, J-Term is essentially a favorable replacement of mid-term examinations. However, J-Term is also an experience unlike any other, as it is a time when students can choose a course they are wholeheartedly interested in and work exclusively with that subject for a full school day over two weeks. The simplest thing to do at this point would be to leave J-Term exactly where it currently is. However, the possibility of moving J-Term to the end of May presents itself as an increasingly appealing option.
Because May is at the end of the school year, it poses a variety of benefits that the winter cannot provide. For instance, J-Term courses like Urban Farming would be able to grow more plants outdoors than they can currently in the greenhouses. Similar weather restrictions affect other courses as well, particularly those that take field trips. For example, the City of Brotherly Love class takes about six field trips during J-Term to different battlegrounds and historical sites in the Philadelphia region during the icy cold of January. This kind of weather cannot possibly be considered conducive to a positive learning experience. In addition to the weather, the issue of the lack of examinations has arisen. Most students would say that they prefer J-Term to mid-term exams, but some, and reasonably so, would rather the opportunity to elevate their semester grades and feel more prepared for the stressful environment that surrounds finals.
Furthermore, the actual positioning of J-Term is questionable, as students just returning from winter vacations often miss multiple days of J-Term, and the circumstance that J-Term causes the time off from regular classes to be far too long. Nearly a month off from school can potentially inhibit the consistency of Episcopal’s learning environment, and the ability for students to remember a given subject’s concepts effectively.
Charles Bryant, Upper School AP U.S. History teacher questions whether having a full month off from school is academically prudent; “I am a big fan of J-term, and love my course with Mr. Lavallee, and hear great things about my colleagues’ courses as well. As a department chair, though, I have to wonder if having the experience in the spring might be better for the overall academic program.”
Although the idea of turning January-Term into May-Term seems like a good idea when considering the issues that having J-Term in the middle of the school year cause, some students are still in favor of the current placement. Haley Potter ’16 stated, “I think moving J-Term to May would somewhat defeat the purpose of having it at all. Putting J-Term in January is a great way to break up the school year for students and by having it in May people will become much less focused on exams when they really count.”
Photo Courtesy of EAJTERMMAGIC
Moving J-Term to May would definitely raise a lot of questions about the layout of the school year as a whole. What would become of final exam week? Would students still have to take exams during, before, or after a potential May-Term? Is having a two-week experiential learning period at the very end of the school year really the best placement for something so time-consuming? These are the kinds of questions that definitely have to be answered by faculty and administrators before making any decisions about the possible new positioning of J-Term within the school year. However, given our current experience of J-Term, May seems to be an increasingly viable position for this two week experience.