Advisory is a time, happening usually once or twice a week for a fifteen-minute period, where you spend time together as an advisory – supposedly getting to know each other. Community Time is a time when we do things as a community for 50 minutes either once or twice per week. I strongly believe that we should reevaluate the non-academic time in our day, adjusting it to create better use of advisory and community times in the Upper School.
The problem about advisory is, if they want us to know each other more, why is it only once or twice a week? In Middle School, Advisory was three times per week, but in Upper School now we only have it once a week. If it is only once a week, how are people (especially ninth graders and new kids) going to branch out and make new friends?
Like Middle School, there should be advisory pizza parties during lunch so advisories are together for a longer time – especially for new ninth graders and many new kids. From Middle School, I remember pizza parties were a time for me to get to know my peers better, and I think Upper Schoolers can benefit from that too.
We should also have a set advisory time every day. This is so we can spend more time with our advisories. Comparing this to House Meetings, there are a lot of kids in each house, so it’s possible that students may only focus on their friends and not on who’s in their advisory. So having a set advisory time can help us get to know our advisees while maybe being with one or two friends.
Lastly, we should have advisory competitions against the other advisories so we can learn to work as a team to accomplish a goal. From my experiences of doing cup stacking in Middle School, I learned to trust my teammates because they are cup stacking on stage to represent our advisory and to cheer my fellow advisees on whether I was on stage or not, as it is very difficult to be on stage.
Community Time is something that occurs twice a rotation where we gather together as a community for activities planned by the school. The takeaways from the activities I’ve done were to respect other people’s opinions and that people have more in common than we think. The benefits are that you get to meet new people and interact with people. While those are the positives, there also are some negatives.
The biggest thing is, as a school, we don’t have Community Time on important dates in history and all we have instead is just a moment of silence. For example, some of the important days in history that we should have community time are Sept. 11, the day when the Twin Towers fell; Dec. 7, when Pearl Harbor was bombed; Jan. 6, when a group of pro-Trump protesters breached the U.S. Capitol; Jan. 20, Inauguration Day and Nov. 5, Election Day.
It’s upsetting because, for some, these could have been life-changing and altered someone’s view of life in some way and we do not have Community Times to acknowledge these days.
Community Time on these days would be important for us to talk about these situations so we can understand what happened in history and hopefully not repeat it.
Another Community Time I think we should have, starting next year especially, is on April 11. This is because, on April 11, former student Matthew Whitehead ‘29 passed away. Next year, the Class of 2029 will be coming to Upper School, so it is important that we honor their beloved friend who unfortunately passed away too soon.
Some things we can do during these Community Times are talk about and reflect on what happened in history on this day. We can also discuss why we should honor those on these days and incorporate other ideas suggested by students.
Lastly, something else that should be added during Community Time is more guest speakers. We could have guest speakers that were a part of the important dates in history above. This would be important because this could be a very touching experience for some people and change the way people think about something.
Advisory should be held more than once a week, especially for ninth graders so the advisories can provide an easier translation from the Middle School to the Upper School, there should be more advisory challenges and pizza parties should be held so the advisory can get comfortable with each other.
Lastly, there should be Community Times held on important dates in history because they were days that people would notoriously remember, so it is important to gather as a community to talk about why this happened and how we can prevent some of these things from happening in the future.