Eye of the Tiger
A good idea never properly realized, order is restored by doing away with PAWSWednesday, May 02, 2012 By Katelyn Rolen
Recently, PAWS has been voted down by RHS faculty and there has been quite a bit of controversy over the subject. Some want to see PAWS come back new and improved and some welcomed the hasty exit of PAWS with open arms. I happen to be one of those people. In my opinion, I think that PAWS was introduced to RHS with the good intentions of helping our test scores and improving our school overall, but in the end, it created more problems than it solved. Confusion among the student body was always a downside to the PAWS intervention period. I, for one, constantly wondered where to go, what to sign up for, what class I had to be in and what teacher I had to check in with for PAWS. Because of all the changes to the PAWS schedule, students barely had time to get a concrete grip on the schedule, before it was shifted yet again. The aforementioned frequent schedule changes of course did not come about on their own. Administration must have spent extensive amounts of time constructing new forms of the school schedule that would ideally enforce PAWS in a more effective manner. But no matter how the schedule was tweaked, shifted, or changed, PAWS never quite lived up to the improvements that we had hoped for. By deciding to remove PAWS from instructional school hours, RHS faculty made a well educated decision that will ultimately save a lot of time and confusion. If the success brought by PAWS was drastic, then it would have been worth every schedule change, every minute of our faculty’s time and every other difficulty or bit of confusion that was the result of adding PAWS to our school schedule. But unfortunately, the achievements of PAWS did not equate to the obstacles it created. It is also not a secret that PAWS was not a popular program among us students. It was not rare to come across complaints when the PAWS bell rang. I was one of those people who considered PAWS to be the low point of my school day, because I felt that PAWS wasn’t necessarily beneficial to myself, or really to the majority of the student population. Think about it, with all the schedule changes, it either took you or your teacher five minutes to figure out how PAWS is currently functioning and then it took probably about another five minutes to get to where you’re supposed to be, or to get you’re PAWS class quiet and settled and ready to work. Right there is ten minutes gone. So now you’ve got twenty minutes and by that time, your teacher is hustling around the room attempting to help everyone with their work. You can probably take away another five minutes from PAWS while waiting for your teacher to help you. In the end, you find that you and everyone else here at RHS put in a lot of effort into organizing PAWS for what? Fifteen minutes of work? Where is that going to get you? Conclusively, PAWS was a theoretically good idea. But, in the end, it turned out to be the very embodiment of a concept that does not do as planned once it is implemented. I believe that an accurate decision was made when PAWS was voted down. As a whole, it did not provide the dramatic improvement that we had all hoped for. |