8th Period: A New Pathway
Rainer Arendt (10-1) & Leonard Vekker (10-4)
Photo courtesy of Rainer Ardent (10-1)
The sudden implementation of Pathways at the beginning of this school year took Masterman by storm. Students felt that it was uncalled for, and a harsh change from last school year. This begs multiple questions: Why was Pathways created? Will Pathways ever change?
The answer to the former is fairly simple and straightforward: students enrolled in the School District of Philadelphia are required to have 7 hours and 4 minutes of instruction time every school day. With classes ending at 2:28, students have only had 6 hours and 13 minutes of instruction time. The missing 51 minutes is where Pathways come in. Pathways fills in that missing time—even though it is hard to describe sitting in an echoey, loud auditorium with no desks as instruction time. As for why we were able to leave at 2:31 last year was because, as stated by Mr. Gilken, “it was either grace on the District's part or an oversight,” as Masterman was in a period of administrative uncertainty with 3 different administrations from October 2021 to May 2022.
Prior to Covid, “Pathways,” formerly known as “options,” had a different structure that allowed students to use lunch as an instruction time. This was an enrichment program that allowed students to take classes for partial credits, such as Arabic, Computer Science, ASL, and Photoshop. This counted as instructional time and allowed students to leave after 7th period. These classes were all taught by outside instructors, but after the Covid-19 pandemic, logistical issues threw a wrench into the program. Mr. Gilken explained, “we lost a staff person who was assigned to do all that, and we lost the position as well. We are trying to get it back on, but we don't have the person power to run an enrichment program.” The Pathways solution to a lack of instruction time is by no means permanent. In fact, the administrative team at Masterman hopes to have the enrichment program back up and running by the beginning of next year, at the latest.
The return of the enrichment program is promising news for many students who are unhappy with the current state of Pathways. There is a wide variety of issues that students bring up about Pathways. One popular issue is students not being able to get out of Pathways for an extracurricular that's not close enough to the end of seventh period, the most prominent example of this being rowing.
Many Masterman students are athletes at Philadelphia City Rowing, a free rowing club for public school students. At the beginning of the school year, PCR student-athletes were told that they would be able to skip Pathways in order to travel to practice. Because PCR is not a sport directly tied to Masterman, there was trouble allowing PCR student-athletes to leave early in order to get to practice. For a short period of time, there was a sign-out sheet in the gym for PCR, but the sheet was removed within a week. The explanation for the disappearance of the sign-out sheet was that because practice starts at 4:15, PCR student-athletes wouldn’t need to leave Masterman at 2:28. The current location of PCR practices is at the Dragon Boat dock on the west side of the Schuylkill River, which is an hour-long walk. If student-athletes walk to practice at 3:19, they arrive late. Ciaran Yudiono (10-4) says, “It felt unfair; I remember going to the athletics office and being told ‘It starts at 4, you cannot get out for that’, it takes an hour for me to get there! It's frustrating.” Another complaint many students share is the location of Pathways. Freshmen to juniors are bound to the loud auditorium and lunchroom, both less than ideal for a study hall. “The idea of it is fine, but you can’t quite study in an auditorium, it doesn't quite work out” Tino Karakousis (11-2) remarks. Something that was meant to be an effective resource for students to catch up on work doesn't provide the productivity it presented.
While there do seem to be issues with the current state of Pathways, there could also be some benefits to it. Pathways provided an incentive for students to do more extracurricular activities and explore new opportunities. Margareth Tanasaputra (10-4), took up Jazz to get out of Pathways and people joined new sports such as Girl's Volleyball and Boy's Soccer which saw noticeable amounts of new people.
There are many pros and cons of Pathways. It has motivated students to try new things, but has been an issue for students who struggle with concentrating in the auditorium and whose schedules, though busy, don’t excuse them from Pathways. While Pathways is frustrating to many students, the plans to modify it bring light at the end of the tunnel.