Class Periods vs. Bells

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there. This is Donald. I’m calling from Newport, Kentucky.

Newport, Kentucky, right across the river from Cincinnati.

Indeed.

Hi, Donald. Welcome to the show.

So I’m a high school English teacher in Cincinnati, and we have a seven-period day, or days divided into seven class periods.

I’m not originally from Cincinnati. One of the things I’ve noticed about kind of school nomenclature here, everyone here refers to the class period as a bell.

You know, you have a first bell class, a second bell class. I’ve been to schools before where they have like a bell schedule, but they’ll still refer to it as first period, second period.

And I’ve never heard this anywhere else other than Cincinnati. Kids will say, I have biology third bell and calculus fourth bell.

Or people will say, what time does this bell start? What time does this bell start?

Oh, interesting. And Donald, where did you grow up?

I grew up in Northeast Ohio in the Cleveland area, but we moved around a lot when I was a kid. So I attended lots of different schools.

I’ve been to schools where I went to junior high in Oklahoma, and it was first hour, second hour. And I think the class periods were actually an hour long, so that made sense.

Yeah, but this bell thing, I’ve never heard outside of Cincinnati.

All right, I’m going to give you a way to find out a little bit more about this, but you’re going to have to do your own primary research, all right?

Okay. What you need to do is take the phrase like fifth bell or sixth bell and combine it with the words school and schedule, and just do a quick Google for that.

And what you’re going to come up with, as I did when I did something similar, is a bunch of schools around the country that use a very similar bell system.

And you will find other schools in Ohio that do it too. And even some schools in Canada, it’s not that common, but you will find school schedules where we’ll say, you know, first bell is science and then a 10-minute break and second bell is whatever, da-da-da-da-da.

And so you’ll find other schools do this. So it seems to be just a different kind of way of sorting the day.

One thing that I noticed when I did it, and it doesn’t sound like your school is quite like this. This is why I asked how many bells you have.

Some of them, a bell actually doesn’t demarcate a class. It demarcates a time period where you might have a class plus another activity.

So a class plus a study hall or a class plus lunch or a class plus time to get to the other building, something like that. Is that how it is in your school, Donald?

Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, I like how he said that the bell demarcates a period of time rather than the sound or whatever.

And I did the Google search for, you know, bell class period thing, and a lot of schools will have a bell schedule. But, you know, I have yet to find anyone who refers to the actual period as a bell.

Right. The cool thing about this radio show, Donald, is that we have a ton of listeners. And so we’re going to ask everybody if they know this particular use of bells to refer to classes.

Do you go to fifth bell and it turns out to be a science class? It’s really interesting to me. I didn’t encounter it. We just have classes.

Yeah. So give us a call if you use Bell in the ways that Donald’s school uses Bells, 877-929-9673.

Well, great. I will be eager to hear what people have to say then.

Yeah, we’ll find out, right?

All right. Good to talk with you, Donald.

Thanks so much.

Okay. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

So I see Bell usages like that in Virginia, South Carolina, Canada.

Yeah. And it’s very clear from the schedule that they’re referring to that it’s not just like three Bells clustered at the start of the day to stop tardiness.

It’s like throughout the day and there’s different kind of patterns going on there.

So, I don’t know. My school wasn’t like that. We just kind of, it seemed ordinary to me at the time.

I know. I’m thinking it was more like a buzzer at my school.

A buzzer. No, we had the old—

First buzzer. We had the old-fashioned. It sounds like the bank’s being robbed. That’s what we had.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.