"It's a Bit Big For a Calendar!" — The Browning School

February 26, 2020

Growing up in the Sixties, surrounded by a flock of British relatives, my family became avid devotees of the comedy duo Flanders & Swann. Their iconic “Hippopotamus Song” will figure prominently in an upcoming blog, but in one routine, Michael Flanders portrays a Neolithic observer commenting on Stonehenge:

“What’s this then?

“It’s a what?

“A calendar?

“It’s a bit big for a calendar!”

Colleges and universities carve up the year in a number of interesting ways, and while few students are going to choose a college primarily on the calendar, it’s worth noting some of the relative advantages of the various models.

Most schools divide their academic year into two semesters, each of which lasts about 15 weeks. Students typically take four or five courses per semester. A savvy student will enroll in a mix; avoiding multiple upper-division math classes or reading-intensive or lab classes at once. If you need to take calculus and organic chemistry, match them up with a literature course, a foreign language, and a music class.

A number of schools prefer to divide the academic year into three 10-week terms. Union College is an example. At Union, a student will normally take three courses at a time. Here you are taking fewer courses, so you are juggling less, but the pace is a little quicker.

Quite a few colleges, mostly small liberal arts institutions, offer a creative hybrid model, usually referred to as “4-1-4.” They start with two semesters, about 13 weeks each, with students normally taking four courses in each of those terms. Then nestled neatly in between, usually in January, is one four-week long term where students will take one course. This “Jan” or “short” term offers an extraordinary amount of flexibility. Many of these courses cover a semester’s worth of curriculum intensively. A student might take organic chemistry, arguably the most difficult college class, and not have to worry about the workload infringing on other classes. Most schools also offer topical or inter-disciplinary options, like “Mathematics for Social Justice,” “Vikings of the North Atlantic,” “Food and the Sacred,” or “Sonic Arts & Crafts.” Courses like “Hiroshima and the Nuclear Age” or “Disaster, Displacement, Diaspora” might even include travel components. Bates College places the short term in May, which can allow students who travel to extend their stay and those who opt-out of the term to begin their summer job or internship a month early.

A few schools, like Dartmouth College, operate on the quarter system. They, too, have three terms during the academic year but add a full term in the summer. Dartmouth requires all students to spend their second summer on campus, then allows them to choose any three terms per year that suit them.

This year, Colorado College is celebrating the 50th Anniversary of The Block Plan, an innovative and nearly unique calendar that divides the academic year into eight (originally nine) three-and-a-half week-long segments called “blocks.” You take one course each block and cover a semester’s worth of work. For the student who loves to hyper-focus and throw himself into a class to the exclusion of everything else, it’s nirvana. The student who has to move on to something else after devouring history for two hours needs to go elsewhere. In the Block Plan, the flexibility of “short” terms is replicated throughout the year. A political science class can travel up to Denver to study the state legislature, a geology class can head up into the mountains to search for trilobites, and a French class can spend two weeks in the Loire Valley. Only CC, Cornell College in Iowa, and Quest University in British Columbia follow this one-course-at-a-time approach.

In all of these institutions, a student is in classes for roughly 30 weeks per year and takes roughly 36 courses before graduation. While most families won’t give the calendar a thought as they research college options, each model presents its own set of strengths (and its own set of vacations) so it makes sense to pay attention!