Remember the good old days? I’m not talking about childhood, the pre-pandemic years, or even winter break. I mean the 2022-23 school year, when nesting days were mandatory in every class.
For those unlucky enough to have never experienced a nesting day, this term is the Enloe-themed pseudonym for a study hall period. Teachers don’t assign any new work, giving students a chance to catch up and turn in missing assignments. Nesting days can also be good opportunities for remediation, retakes, or make-up assessments. They are often given at the end of the quarter, as students and teachers rush to submit work and enter grades, respectively. In Enloe’s past, each class was required to have one nesting day per quarter. Though nesting days still exist now, they are quite rare.
Nesting days are much appreciated by the Enloe student population. Burnout runs rampant through the Enloe halls, and many students say nesting days are a critical tool to mitigate it. For freshmen who don’t yet know how to properly manage their time, nesting days provide an opportunity to experiment without severe repercussions. Junior Serena Zhang experienced Enloe’s mandatory nesting day policy and would like to return to it. She recounts her freshman year, saying, “It was really useful to have nesting days at the end of the quarter in case I needed to catch up on work. If there were missing assignments, or if I had questions for the teacher and they weren’t planning to teach that day, it was a lot easier. It felt like a cushion.” Sophomore Vansh Jain, who entered Enloe after the system ended and has thus only had occasional nesting days, agrees with Zhang. He remarks that having nesting days “gives me peace of mind.”
Teachers also acknowledged the benefits that nesting days provide. “If you’re nesting to let students who are really falling behind get some kind of remedial support, that’s good,” says Spanish teacher Señor West. For him, nesting days offer “ a chance within the school schedule to give [students] that opportunity to get work made up, but not miss classroom practice and instructional time, because then they just fall further behind.” Biology teacher Mr. Bowen, who prefers when he has full discretion over nesting days in his class, adds, “It gives me time… to catch up on grading, especially near the end of the quarter. [It] gives me time to plan lessons, to prep labs, [and] if I have to talk to other teachers about things, it gives me a chance to do that.”
It’s understandable why teachers may be against offering nesting days in their classes: their primary goal is to teach, and nesting days inherently take away educational time. “It’s a big scheduling commitment, because you have to decide to give up a day that you could be teaching something else, and there are, it feels like, never enough days to get everything done,” says Mr. Bowen. However, some teachers might not realize that these study hall periods can increase students’ comprehension. Students have eight classes competing for their attention, and only one can win at any given moment. Realistically, students often prioritize the work for one class even while physically present in another, thus not paying attention to the latter subject. Giving students a nesting day allows them to complete this aforementioned work and then actually focus on the lesson when it is taught later.
Traditionally, the school hours were for learning, and after school was the time to do homework. As much as everyone would like to believe that this is still the case, admittedly, things have changed. Now more than ever, students feel immense pressure to overload their schedules with extracurriculars, work, or other activities. As a result, homework does not get done in the hours after school, prompting students to frantically complete it while sitting in class. It becomes a vicious cycle: panicking to finish the work for your “more important” classes makes you fall behind in your “less important” ones. Suddenly, the work is piling up in your “easier” classes too, and before you know it, you’re buried in assignments. A nesting day can be your shovel, helping you dig yourself out of the hole you’ve created.
Another argument against nesting days is that it forces the pace of the class to be faster. Some teachers point out that an entire class period devoted to “doing nothing” means that the rest of the curriculum has to be taught in a shorter time frame. But in reality, including one nesting day a quarter wouldn’t take up more time, rather, the time would just be seen in a different light. Sometimes teachers are out unexpectedly and don’t assign work to their students. Instead of viewing this absence as lost time, if students’ outstanding work doesn’t require the teacher’s presence, it could be considered the nesting day for the quarter, thus preserving all of the “teachable” moments.
As all students can likely agree, school can sometimes feel like too much. Nesting days can help ease this burden, at least mentally. “If you’re nesting to give students [time] who have seven AP classes and they’re overwhelmed and they just need time to breathe, I think that’s [also] good because that’s emotional support,” says Señor West.
Not Accepted After (NAA) dates are the newest addition to Enloe’s grading policy. They set a primary deadline, then extend the date for final submissions to two class periods later, instead of giving students a designated class period to work on any overdue assignments. Ostensibly, NAA dates fill the nesting day vacuum; however, students and staff alike have realized that NAA dates aren’t achieving their intended purpose due to differing interpretations of the ambiguous rules and manipulation of inherent loopholes. Zhang describes the vagueness of the system, asserting, “I don’t think the teachers all follow the same NAA policy… Also, I don’t really know what the two-day NAA policy means. Is that two days on the calendar, or two days as in two classes? It’s really unclear.” Some teachers only apply the NAA rule to homework, but the line between classwork and homework is often blurry, making it hard to tell when the NAA date can even be used. Meanwhile, other teachers set an arbitrary due date that they realize is completely unreasonable, so that the NAA date is the day they actually want it in, essentially undermining the point of the system. “Managing two extra class periods from a thing that you asked them to turn in is kind of a pain,” explains Mr. Bowen. When teachers make an insanely early due date, the “extra” time becomes the appropriate amount of time. In doing so, teachers avoid the hassle but expose a systematic flaw in the policy. Enloe replaced nesting days with NAA dates because NAA dates were supposed to be better, but if they’re not, why can’t the school go back to the former policy?
No teacher can ever force a student to use their time wisely and do their work, no matter what tactic they use. But at the end of the day, teachers want their students to succeed in their classes, and giving them much-needed time to catch up aids this objective. Some of the students seen slacking off aren’t careless or procrastinators—they’ve actually finished all of their assignments. In this case, why shouldn’t they get a chance to enjoy themselves? Enloe is a very intense school, and unlike NAA dates, nesting days reward the students who have stayed on top of everything and put in their best effort.
A reinstatement of the policy requiring one nesting day per quarter per class would boost the morale of students, teachers, and Enloe pride as a whole. After all, according to Zhang, the phrase nesting day “really goes with the school spirit.”
