School is officially in session! Just like every new school year, comes changes — new students, new utensils… and new school terms? The State High administration has publicly announced that previous years’ study halls will now officially be referred to as P.A.W.S. (Planning Achievement With Support) Time, a word play on “pause time” for study hall and the “paws” of the Little Lion mascot.
But this change was not needed. Just the name “study hall” was a great indicator of what the class entailed and what the students would expect walking into their next classroom. Now that the name has been changed for a pun, P.A.W.S. Time definitely stirs some confusion with its misleading title that indicates time to rest or “pause” instead of time dedicated to the studies.
With the way P.A.W.S. Time is structured, it is almost identical to the former study halls.
“It’s pretty similar to study halls, the only difference now is we’re kind of checking in with kids to make sure that they’re doing the stuff they are supposed to,” Douglas Schunk, science teacher managing two P.A.W.S. Time classes, said. There’s a stricter emphasis on getting schoolwork done but other than that, no major changes made to the course itself except for the name.
The conclusion that we arrive at is that State High went through the trouble of causing an inconvenient change to everyone for a trivial reason like wordplay. However, junior Areebah Shuhrat Labiba challenged that notion.
“But is change really a bad thing?” Labiba questioned, “Everything in the world is constantly changing, you have to evolve with these things and not be stuck in the same place.”
Although I agree with Labiba’s point, there is a distinction between changes that are inevitable and changes that are unnecessary. In this case, P.A.W.S. Time would be accounted for as one of the unnecessary changes which are best kept at minimum.
Change, in itself, is not a bad thing; in fact, I would say that the inevitability of it is what allows us to be challenged and grow as individuals. But, in that sense, we still need some type of stability to balance our hectic lives within the school walls. High schoolers are facing unavoidable changes every day from school expectations to social environments. There is a lot going on for everyone.
Adding onto that stress isn’t going to make it any better, especially considering that the change placed onto the students was pointless in the first place. The P.A.W.S. Time title change was more of a hindering burden than a fun idea.
Furthermore, the modification to P.A.W.S. Time leads to a more serious conversation on SCASD’s repeated ventures with changing yet another perfectly functioning system within the school for the sake of seemingly no rational reason. Some important instances to note include the switch to Synergy, the moving from Canvas to Google Classroom, and now it’s the study halls. And this makes one wonder: what else is going to be subject to this pattern? Is this really a good thing in our district?
Either way, my stance on “study hall” being turned into “P.A.W.S. Time” is a fair mix of both neutrality and questioning. There isn’t much of a positive difference, but it’s also hard to say it was a negative change. I don’t think that P.A.W.S. Time was necessary and that it would have been more convenient to all of us had we kept study halls. Nonetheless, the change has been placed whether we like it or not and there is not much we can do. As Labiba mentioned, we would have to adapt to the situation at one time or another, so earliest is the best.
