As the year closes, I think it’s appropriate to recall the article I wrote last September criticizing the school’s implementation of Making Our School a More Inclusive Community (MOSAIC) before it even really started. 

I discussed the pitfalls in the class’s strategy of swapping tutorial time with a session for dumping wisdom onto highschoolers. Essentially, most useful wisdom can only be earned through life experiences, and when it is transmitted by other means, it should be done in a concise manner. It logically followed that MOSAIC would render itself another waste of time like advisory. 

And after actually experiencing the monthly-occurring course, I can say with full certainty that those points aged like fine wine. 

MOSAIC is, at its best, a minor inconvenience, and at its worst, a sequence of tedious exercises. The class spent extensive time stretching out life lessons such as time management using online calendars, why sleep-deprivation is bad (pretty obvious), the importance of being nice to people (taught using a random YouTube video social experiment study), etc. The messages themselves weren’t what made the class bad, but the plenteous time spent analyzing every angle of them was.

Even though each session only lasts the duration of a Blue Day tutorial, simple concepts are strung out for far too long.

So much of these classes didn’t even need to happen. The school could just give a short slide-show to students twice a year that includes all the lessons MOSAIC aims to impart, but in condensed bullet-points.

These shorter presentations would get the same points across more quickly. The sheer length of MOSAIC is what makes it a chore, not the content which can easily be compressed.

From what I saw, most students didn’t even engage with what was taught in these classes; they were either talking to friends, on their phones or doing school work, which is why I think MOSAIC has fulfilled the role I anticipated. 

It’s become a requirement at our school akin to jury duty: You relinquish your time for something you’re not necessarily willing to do.

I hope the school considers my idea of improving MOSAIC by boiling it down to its essential parts. While it has good intentions, the class trades a large chunk of highschoolers’ valuable time for lessons that could be delivered in a few minutes.