With the new whole grain cookies and Bring Your Own Device implementation, I didn’t think that the district could irritate me anymore. I was wrong.

After finding out that we would now be having “Mentor Mondays” every week, my irritation skyrocketed. Although I am aware, and you should be too, that this requirement was initiated to prove that the district could find a way to improve student’s grades and decrease the amount of missing assignments, it appears to me that they failed to review all of the cons of the idea.

For four years now, I have been reminded that seminars are to be used productively doing school work. To effectively do my schoolwork, I may need to go to my math teacher, do research in the media center, work with a classmate, etc. Apparently I am no longer able to do that on Mondays. On top of that, teachers have PLC’s once a week. That automatically takes another day of my week away to get help from a teacher, leaving us with only three days to talk to a teacher if we need to.

If the purpose for this new policy is to get seminar teachers to mentor and help their students, tell me how someone who is in a math teacher’s seminar will get help with their English paper, or vice versa. I’m also fairly confused on what it means to be mentored by a teacher who has 25 other students to mentor. If the reason for this is to check our grades, fine. But does it really take 40 minutes to tell me if I’m failing any classes? Probably not. This idea should work, in theory, but instead should be cut back to half of the Monday seminar. In doing so, students could use the other half to talk to teachers about poor grades, turn in missing assignments or prepare for tests.