Viktoria Lutsenko

Wearing a striped shirt, the minute is impossible to find. It blends in with all the other numbers in the background.

Back to school means a lot of new changes, some less discussed than others.
Gates and bleachers are the changes on the surface, but mostly gone unnoticed is that the school day at Cal High has actually become shorter by one minute. Seriously.
Students may be thinking that they’re still at Cal for five hours a day, but for a select few who soldier through B period at the end of the day, the amount of time in class has decreased.
That’s right, a whole minute has been given ever so gracefully back to the B period students. It’s just evaporated into thin air like a bottle of dichloromethane when left uncapped.
The 60 seconds lost has been quite the mystery on campus.
Where did it go? What should students do with all this newfound time? Why should they care?
These questions must be answered.
So I went to the only man who could have the answer, the warden of Cal, Principal Demetrius Ball, who brushed aside the missing minute as nothing but a clerical fix within the district.
“So we took the one minute away,” Ball said. “It didn’t have a huge impact on the total number of minutes students are in class.”
School now ends for B period students at 3:40 p.m. instead of 3:41 p.m. Strike up the band and let the party commence!
A reimbursement for the time that B period students draggingly endured the past two years seems like a logical solution.
But Ball responded to this suggestion for reimbursement with confusion and a lack of enthusiasm.
“How can you give learning back?” Ball said.
So this solves two questions so far.
The lost minute is only a small change the school has no interest in addressing.
That’s anticlimactic to say the least.
But there’s more questions to be asked regarding the impact of this earth-shattering change.
One of these questions is what should students do with all this newfound time?
There are endless ways to spend this free time.
Parasailing, traveling across the world, and even going on vacation all sound like fantastic options spend the additional two hours and 15 minutes given to B period students this year.
There’s nothing we can do for this tragic lost time, so I got to thinking about Ball’s question.
How can you give learning back?
Students have different answers for this question.
Sophomore Maya Bebenita doesn’t think B period students from the past two school years deserve reimbursement for the time they spent in class.
“I signed up for it myself,” Bebenita said.
Many students agree that the extra minute seems to be negligible, especially when students who take B periods do so willingly.
“[B period students] signed up for it,” freshman Swan Doddavaraph said.
Underclassmen and teachers alike agree with the change of reducing B period by a minute.
Algebra 1 teacher Renu Chhawla happens to really like the change.
“I think it’s ok because 3:40 is much easier to remember and I like it that way,” Chhawla said.
It seems the underclassmen and teachers yearn for more time spent in the prison, I mean school.
Upperclassmen, on the other hand, seem to want to be repaid from their time inside these dreaded school walls.
And this is totally reasonable.
Senior Mich White said he disagreed with the popular opinion of most underclassmen and believes the minute should be reimbursed to former B period students.
A minute adds up over an entire school year after all.
So, how would this reimbursement go about, some may be asking?
Well, after pondering for exactly one minute, I came to a conclusion.
Maybe administrators should just bring the missing minute back to be reincorporated into the school day after all.
Was he right about all of this? Did Ball really have a point that the missing minute wasn’t that big of a deal?
Junior Mateo Young agrees, saying the time difference doesn’t really matter all that much.
“[It’s] a little pointless,” Young said.
Could I just be jealous of this new generation getting time off, or could something more sinister than just an aesthetically pleasing fix be afoot?
A minute is such a gigantic amount of time, especially since the average teenager is incredibly responsible.
A minute could help students with more time on a test, more time to talk to a teacher or more time to avoid the god awful traffic in the back lot.
And most importantly of all, in a minute you can fall down a staircase and break every single one of your bones.
So maybe a minute isn’t as productive as it seems for dumb teenagers, but it’s the thought that counts.
And if the school wants to continues this trend of shedding minutes from every year, I think many students will realize that even a small amount of extra free time is a great gift.
As it turns out, the missing minute isn’t necessarily bad.
Maybe students will even be able to fix their sleep schedules with this added blessing of free time.
But they’ll most likely spend this minute doomscrolling on their phones.