There are certain activities that will always be fixtures of an Andover student’s Saturday morning. Although cartoons and family breakfasts were cornerstones of our childhood weekends, our morning routines have evolved with age. Some of us may choose to hit their snooze on their alarm roughly a dozen times before crawling out of bed at one in the afternoon. Others may choose to rise early and meet friends in Commons for breakfast, and a notable group of athletes will spend their morning competing in athletic events. But regardless of age, there is one thing that has never been a welcome addition to our weekend schedule. Once again, this Friday night will not be a time of relaxation and enjoyment, but rather a time of silence and studying. Saturday classes are here again. A long-time sore spot among Andover students, Saturday classes evoke a general outcry of dread every year as students again sound the call to abolish the system immediately. However, the administration has stood firm in its stance to protect Saturday classes despite student (and sometimes teacher) protests. So what exactly are the reasons for keeping Saturday classes? There seem to be two central arguments in favor of the current system. First, by moving two class periods from Friday to Saturday, Saturday classes spread out the workweek, slowing down the pace of life and making homework on Thursday nights a bit more tolerable. “My understanding is that the school has Saturday classes in order to create some open space during the end of the week. We are a boarding school and so Saturday is a great time to schedule some classes,” says Paul Murphy, Dean of Students, in an email. Second, using Saturday classes allows Admissions to assuage the concerns of parents of prospective students. Parents could perceive a boarding school without Saturday classes as less committed to academics than a school with a six-day workweek, or they could think that students treat the school as a five-day, weekly boarding school where students clear off each weekend, leaving campus a ghost town for non-local students. But these arguments are not valid. Saturday classes may indeed make the workweek less intense, but they do so by prolonging it, an ineffective solution. Only full weekends allow students to take a mental break from work to recover and rejuvenate. They provide two full nights of sleep, whereas weekends with Saturday classes provide only one. Many students use Friday night and Saturdays to unwind before spending the rest of the weekend doing work. By basically cutting the weekend in half, the leisure time is replaced with more work, and one week simply blends into another without a sufficient break, leaving students fatigued come the next Monday. This situation is especially difficult for athletes, who basically lose their entire Saturday between classes and athletic competitions. The Admissions argument is based in concern for Andover’s image, which we agree is an important aspect of our school. But PA would not be a “slacker” school or a “weekly” boarding school just because we did not have Saturday classes, regardless of what prospective students perceive to be the case. Andover students still work hard on the weekends, but they benefit mentally from the technically unstructured time. Policy concerning weekend classes should keep in mind the interests of students who actually attend Andover, as opposed to those who are simply considering it. The current approach of only a few Saturday classes is definitely preferable to a weekly system. We appreciate the fact that the administration does not want to infringe too much on the Andover student’s routine. Yet Saturday classes do not seem to benefit students in any way, and they can make life more difficult for both students and teachers alike. We don’t mind an intense week, but we’d like our weekends free. This editorial represents the views of Editorial Board CXXXIII.
