Having shorter periods and all eight classes each day is more beneficial than having longer periods and only half of your classes each day. With longer classes, students tend to be less engaged and more exhausted, sitting down and typically learning about the same thing for almost an hour and a half. A lot of times, students will be tired and drained at first or last period classes because they either just woke up, or just went through the whole day. I think having only four periods makes students a lot less productive, and feeling more like the day drags on, which makes them a lot less likely to be engaged in a class, more looking at the time and calculating when the period is over.
During long weekends, students will sometimes have a 5-day period of time where they don’t have any classes on a certain day, which is inconvenient and more difficult for students to remember the lesson after not learning about it for almost a week. I think the issue is not being able to have a change of scenery or a change in lessons for over an hour. I believe teenagers and high school students are, if at all, the most burnt out- out of all the years in school, and by making classes that long makes it a lot more difficult to get through the day, and stay focused in class.
By having shorter periods, students will overall be more engaged and productive, retaining more information, because within every hour is something new and different, rather than the same topic or subject. With that being said, if the schedule was in a rotation, the classes students have first or last could be in the middle of the day sometimes, making their learning more productive, and students more engaged, since it’s not 7 AM or 2 PM.