Does it seem like your kid’s class schedule for high school was designed by monkeys?
I am in my 7th and last year of dealing with this. I put everything into Google Calendar so the family has access to the whole thing if they need it. It takes over 2 hours to do this. Here’s why.
The school has A and B days. Fair enough. That would be easy to enter into a schedule.
But … those alternate days of the week: so A days are MWF one week, and TT the next. So that doubles the amount of data entry.
But … … the beloved American 3 day weekend makes that worse. Someone requires that those days off be evenly split between A and B days. Practically, this means that several times during the year an ABABA is followed by an ABABA instead of a BABAB. That adds several special cases that have to be fixed individually.
But … … … our schools came up with the wonderful idea of late-in Wednesdays — because — you know — kids and teachers go to school too much. So there’s a different schedule for those days too, and they’re A’s and B’s too. Let’s use lower case letters for those. So, the basic week is either ABaBA or BAbAB.
But … … … … that’s not the end either. We have two teacher conference weeks each year. These are done on a short day schedule, but not the same short day schedule that they use for Wednesdays all year long. Some dim bulb decided it had to be a different one. So now we have the possibility of not ABaBA or BAbAB but the somewhat shortened ABaBA or BAbAB.
But … … … … … it still gets worse, because during those conference weeks, when they do a short A and B day, they also do Wednesdays that are both short and different. Let’s call those α and ß, so really we have ABαBA or BAßAB.
So, a student or parent, for each week, if it happens to be a full 5 day week, still needs to know if it’s an ABaBA or BAbAB or ABaBA or BAbAB. Google has the ability to repeat those, but because there are so many special cases, the longest pattern in the entire year is 8 instances, which occurs for MF and TT schedules for 4 pairs of consecutive weeks in early spring. Here’s what it ends up looking like over the 37 week school year:
AbAB (School starts on Tuesday, rather than Monday)
ABaBA
BAbAB
AbAB (Same pattern repeated, but Monday off)
ABaBA
BAbAB
ABαBA (Shorter days this week, with a different Wednesday)
BAbAB
ABaBA
BAbAB
AbAB (Same pattern repeated, but Monday off)
ABaBA (Repeating last week’s schedule over 5 days)
BAbAB
ABaBA
BAbAB
AB (Three days off for Thanksgiving)
ABaBA (Repeating last week’s schedule over 5 days)
BAbAB
ABaBA (Followed by 2 weeks off for Christmas)
BAbAB
ABaBA
AbAB (same pattern repeated, but Monday off)
BAbAB
ABαBA (Shorter days this week, with a different Wednesday)
BAbAB
AbAB (same pattern repeated, but Monday off)
ABaBA (Repeating last week’s schedule over 5 days)
BAbAB
ABaBA
bAB (Two random days off for the teachers)
ABaBA (But not repeating the last week on a 5 day schedule)
BAbAB
ABaBA (followed by a week of vacation)
BAbAB
ABaBA
BAbAB
ABaBA
BAbAB
The school has problems with attendance. I wonder if it has anything to do with the students not knowing where they’re supposed to be?
BTW: I need to know the schedule so I can manage rides (our school has not buses at our distance). I have 3 different pick-up times, and 3 different drop-off times. That’s an improvement over last year.
It gets worse. Our local school district does zero coordination with the universities within the state. We are mostly on MWF and TT teaching schedules. Also, while our Christmas breaks overlap, as well as our three day weekends, Spring Break does not, nor do the 2 shorter vacations the kids get off for no reason I can think of.
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I strongly suspect almost all of this is a problem created by legislators and accreditors who require a fixed number of class periods or hours (rather than a more flexible range), and by unions that tweak the schedule to create more time off for members.