New Schedule Woes

High schoolers aren't the only ones with schedule problems. As you might or might not know, our public middle schools all got new schedules, which were supposed to simplify the schedule by changing it from a six-day cycle to a standard five-day schedule. Unfortunately for this idea, the reason behind the six-day cycle was to make it simpler. For example, there are six normal classes and six normal periods, so with six days each class can be in each period once. That doesn't work with a five-day cycle. Also, six is divisible by two and three, allowing one to have one elective two days of the cycle, one another two days, and one on the last two days. Five is a prime number

And there are six days anyway, just one of them is called Friday 2. Beginning to notice a pattern? Exactly. An attempt to make things simpler has really made them more complicated.

To add on, with a new system many people's schedules weren't put together right. Middle school should have arena scheduling. At least it's an improvement on trying to fight your way through a crowd to your guidance councilor who is much to busy and sends you away because your problem isn't big enough, especially when your councilor also has to take on a quarter of the sixth grade because the sixth grade councilor is only working part time at your school and part time at another school due to the override not being passed and not having enough money to hire two councilors instead of one.

Luckily, I had a perfectly normal schedule, as most people did. But I saw plenty of people who had troubles. Here are a few:

"Who's class are you in?" Mr. P, a gym teacher, asked.
"I don't know," the student responded. "Today I'm in yours, but on Wednesdays I'm in Ms. Myers."
"Have you talked to your councilor?"
"She says you should know and that she has no time."
Mr. P left and took some papers and shuffled through them. "You're on my list," he finally said. "But I'll check in with Ms. Myers. My list has a lot of mistakes." So Mr. P goes over to the other gym teacher, talks to her, and comes back puzzled. "Your on both of our lists," he told the student.

One of my friends looked at their schedule on the first day of school, scanned it, and was completely bewildered. "Why are Friday 1 and Friday 2 exactly the same?" she asked. It turned out that they had printed one Friday twice.

Several people had blanks on their schedules. One I found particularly funny was somebody who had no lunches, since every lunch was blank.

-Marianne