Trimester Rotating Block Schedule

A core tenet of Bay’s philosophy is that we seek to help students become careful stewards of time.
This sense of the value of time and sustained attention are reflected in the design of our academic
schedule, which asks students to take fewer classes each term, with more minutes spent in each
class. The school year at Bay is divided into trimesters, each 12 weeks in length, and students take
four classes per term. Each class meets four times per week, 80 minutes per meeting. Over the
course of a year, each student completes twelve trimester-long courses.

The long-block trimester schedule affords a number of distinct advantages over a more traditional
50-minute period, seven periods per day, two semesters per year model. Over two trimesters
(the length of a typical math class, for example), an academic course at Bay will meet more than
90 times, in 80-minute blocks, surpassing the total instruction time available in year-long courses
in most semester-based curricula. Longer blocks allow for easy incorporation of in-depth lessons
and activities such as science labs, field trips, student-initiated projects, in-class writing and
research, and extended discussions. Fewer classes mean less time lost in transition between one
class and the next. Teachers work with fewer students per day thus enabling them to work in
depth with students on an individual basis. Students are able to better concentrate their intellec-
tual efforts on fewer subjects at a time, affording greater depth of thought in each course.
The block schedule also incorporates time dedicated for conferences between students and their
advisors, club meetings, book group, monitored study hall, free social time, and tutorials with
individual teachers.