The Schedule

Many of you know of my obsession with school schedules. I spent MANY hours this past summer working on the whole PHA high school schedule, and it became something of a Holy Quest for Perfection in School Scheduling. Well, perfect it was not, but it ultimately worked. Why am I mentioning this …? Because I finally got my LCS schedule on the Friday before school started, and it’s sort of fascinating / hilarious to note some of the similarities and differences between school here and school there.

Similarity # 1: The schedule is a source of anxiety and stress and pitched battles over what’s really important in the life of a school.

Similarity # 2: The schedule is never done on time. I’ve watched teachers – especially brand new teachers – practically go insane because they don’t have their class schedule yet for so many years, and this year was no different. Somehow they think that this whole mystery and complexity of teaching will be made magically easier by the piece of paper in their hands that tells them in what order and in what rooms their classes will meet. “How am I supposed to plan my classes if I don’t even know when they meet?” My somewhat jaded response … “ummmm …. It doesn’t actually matter that much. You just think it does.”

Similarity # 3: The schedule includes nasty compromises all over it. At the end of making the PHA schedule this summer, I felt kind of gross for having to compromise on many details that I know aren’t best for kids or teachers, but which were simply unavoidable given the limited resources of minutes, humans, and classrooms. Some of the compromises that the LCS schedule makes, however, would be almost unthinkable to PHA folks. Here are some of my favorites:
1. I have three double blocks in the week. All three have the first period in one room and the second period in a different room.
2. Many teachers see one section three times in one day, two times another day, and that’s their five periods of class for the week.
3. There are classes scheduled to meet outside in the tables y the basketball court. (which makes the old PHA “annex” seem kind of luxurious!)
4. One volunteer just discovered that her section of biology only meets 4 times a week while the other teacher’s section meets five times. It is now up to her to go fight for that last hour.
5. When a teacher is double booked – supposed to teach two classes at once – another teacher is assigned to cover one of the sections. (OK fine, to be fair, that DID happen once in the PHA schedule this year ….)
6. There is absolutely, unequivocally, no such thing as anybody “owning” a classroom. My 16 class periods meet in 5 classrooms.

Some other fascinating things about the way school works here …
1. There are 11 40 minute periods each day. Oh ... and everyone doesn't get a personal copy of their schedule. It's posted on sheets of paper in one location in the school, and the kids have to go and copy it down. And it's also not posted as a weekly grid, but as a list of classes each day. A little harder to follow!
2. Each quarter, there’s a whole week for exams, and students expect a week of review. That leaves about seven weeks of teaching each quarter. This one exam counts for 50% of their grade in each class each quarter.
3. School goes from 7 am to 3:25 pm, and is followed by an hour of school cleanup in which all 350 kids are at least loosely engaged in a work activity
4. Kids are often late for class after their lunch period because about 15 kids in each lunch block are assigned to clean the dishes. I have recently discovered this is also a very common excuse for why kids might be late to class in the period after their lunch ….
5. Every night the kids are required to be in a classroom (or hallway near a classroom) studying from 7:30 to 9:30. I love it! More on that later …
6. Lights are out at 10. And when I say lights out, I’m not kidding. They cut off the generators to the dorms. It gets very quiet all of the sudden!