After the third period dismissal bell, the hallways are filled with chaos and a frenzy of lockers opening and closing, and students dipping into one bathroom only to see that the line is too long and they won’t get to their next class in time.

Except that there is no real class that these kids are rushing to get to. Instead, they are rushing to homeroom, the mandatory 10 minute ‘break’ students can have to do… nothing? Homeroom isn’t meant for anything other than a place to go for 10 minutes in the middle of the day. It’s too short to do any homework, which means you’re just sitting there waiting for that 10:41 bell to ring.

On top of this, there are “hallway sweeps” that the deans conduct to ensure that students get to homeroom on time, but then this defeats the idea that homeroom is meant to be a break. Although being late for any reason to a class that does not matter can result in a detention, homeroom is not a class. This is unfair to the students that need to access their lockers or stay after class to talk to a teacher. If homeroom is meant to be a break from classes, detentions should be out of the question.

Although homeroom is supposed to be used as a way for teachers to show students the morning announcements, that is not always the case. Sometimes teachers will just not show the announcements. Others will end up making the entire class shut up in order to show them, which just makes people hate the announcements even more. As a former broadcasting student, I can tell you first hand that the announcements are hard to create. Everything is shot in one take, so if there are any mistakes, the crew has to start all over. It can be really frustrating, but there is a a lot of hard work that is put into the announcements. If there wasn’t any homeroom, students would probably just get emailed the video, enabling them to watch it whenever they have time, not just randomly in the middle of the day, and actually pay attention to the show.

However, there are the few students that use this time to eat lunch, but how can someone only need 10 minutes to eat an entire lunch that was meant for 42. They’re better off eating during one of their other classes or study halls.

The only good part about homeroom that I’ve seen so far is students that don’t bring food from home are able to buy lunch during those few minutes. The downside to that is the wait; I’m pretty sure it takes a few minutes to grab your food, pay and sit down, and by the time that whole process is done, you’re stuck with only half of homeroom to eat, which is 5 minutes.

Overall, I personally think homeroom is a waste of time for the majority of students because they already have a lunch period as a break, and possibly a study hall on top of that. If we did get rid of homeroom, we would be able to either start school later, or end earlier. However, there are the few students that benefit by having homeroom lunch, or using homeroom as a time to stop by their locker or use the bathroom. Therefore, it wouldn’t be beneficial to those few that need the extra 10 minutes.