The school essay is designed to be writable within the time constraints of an in-class exam, and to let teachers grade a whole five class’s worth of essays fast enough to get them back long enough before the next exam.
As a kid I was always confused about why schools had libraries. In elementary school you got sent to them once a week and were allowed to take out one book, and the librarian taught how to use a library. Otherwise, there was never a time you could actually go to them and do research on anything. (Ok, except for once in second grade, when I corrected the teacher on something and she sent me to the library to find a book that proved it). The buses didn’t arrive early or leave late enough to go outside class time, and the library wasn’t open to visit that way anyway. In high school if you had a study hall it was held in the cafeteria or auditorium, and they did not grant people passes to go to the library, either. As a teen I decided school libraries existed so that adults could fight about what books would be in it, not realizing no one ever saw any of them. As an adult I decided it was pure cargo cult mimicry of what an institution trying to educate people would be. I also found it strange that they had a full-time librarian on staff but in 2004 we still used history books where the maps were from before the reunification of Germany.
If we were, no one ever told us, and no one I knew ever did. If nothing else, to do so, we would have had to skip lunch entirely, because we weren’t allowed to be in the halls without a pass signed by a teacher, and there would not have been anyone in the cafeteria to write one.
Admittedly, after 9th grade I stopped taking lunch so I could fit in an extra elective. Also in 9th grade, we had 4 instances of students calling in fake bomb threats in order to get out of class, and ended up with much stricter rules about who could be where, when, than had been the case prior. For example, outside of lunch periods, all but one bathroom in the whole high school was locked, so if you asked for a pass to go use it, then depending on where you were it might mean missing close to 10 minutes of class just to get there and back, or to find out which one was open that day. And they banned teachers from giving out more than one pass at a time, for any reason.
The school essay is designed to be writable within the time constraints of an in-class exam, and to let teachers grade a whole five class’s worth of essays fast enough to get them back long enough before the next exam.
As a kid I was always confused about why schools had libraries. In elementary school you got sent to them once a week and were allowed to take out one book, and the librarian taught how to use a library. Otherwise, there was never a time you could actually go to them and do research on anything. (Ok, except for once in second grade, when I corrected the teacher on something and she sent me to the library to find a book that proved it). The buses didn’t arrive early or leave late enough to go outside class time, and the library wasn’t open to visit that way anyway. In high school if you had a study hall it was held in the cafeteria or auditorium, and they did not grant people passes to go to the library, either. As a teen I decided school libraries existed so that adults could fight about what books would be in it, not realizing no one ever saw any of them. As an adult I decided it was pure cargo cult mimicry of what an institution trying to educate people would be. I also found it strange that they had a full-time librarian on staff but in 2004 we still used history books where the maps were from before the reunification of Germany.
Were you not allowed to go to the library during lunch?
If we were, no one ever told us, and no one I knew ever did. If nothing else, to do so, we would have had to skip lunch entirely, because we weren’t allowed to be in the halls without a pass signed by a teacher, and there would not have been anyone in the cafeteria to write one.
Admittedly, after 9th grade I stopped taking lunch so I could fit in an extra elective. Also in 9th grade, we had 4 instances of students calling in fake bomb threats in order to get out of class, and ended up with much stricter rules about who could be where, when, than had been the case prior. For example, outside of lunch periods, all but one bathroom in the whole high school was locked, so if you asked for a pass to go use it, then depending on where you were it might mean missing close to 10 minutes of class just to get there and back, or to find out which one was open that day. And they banned teachers from giving out more than one pass at a time, for any reason.