It’s part of my job to sift through titanic amounts of customer data, looking for malformed records, missing values, or other such database gremlins and freaks that cause so much consternation to administrators, to say nothing of the hapless users who generally have to be led by the nose to find the Enter key. One side effect of this is that, as the application I support is used exclusively by educational institutions, I have gained much insight into how schools have been conducting their grave affair of molding the flower of our republic, the Leaders of Tomorrow’s World. Let me just state for the record that Tomorrow’s World may well be doomed.

I’m sure you, gentle reader, have heard the asinine stories of kids having to lug around 40 pounds of books because the lockers were removed because drugs might be hidden there. I’m sure that cured those schools’ drug problems. Too bad all those 10-year-olds are now on Vicodin to help with their chronic back problems, but that’s okay, because officially dispensed psychoactive drugs for kids are A-OK, at least in some circles (that’s a good article, by the way, and fairly well balanced). One of my colleagues had a chat with a school IT director who told her that all the lockers were removed "because some kids left food in them". What, were whole raw squids being left in them? Do janitor contracts now include a "no icky things" clause? The mind boggles.

Some of these schools have some seriously messed up schedules. Back in the lost mists of time when I matriculated through my state’s public school system, we had eight periods in our high school day. Four morning classes, lunch, four afternoon classes, and then you went home, if you were a slugabout like I was, with no standing extracurricular obligations like band practice, football, or a willing and attractive member of the opposite gender. Well, for high school, most people were content to stop at willing, but I digress.

One school I had the displeasure of dealing with used nine rotating days and twenty-five periods. Instead of a kid being able to rely on, say, always having Biology after lunch in 5th period, they have a Biology class where the "period" on the schedule looks like: 14-16(A,B,E) 7, 10-14(C) 2,3(D) 20-25(H). That’s one class. A through H are the days that they rotate in sequence, so that alphanumeric jumble means that this poor, defenseless child has Biology in periods 14-16 on A, B, and E days, 10-14 on C days, and so on and so forth, and, again, that’s just for one freakin’ class It’s a wonder they know which room they should be in (assuming that they do). Good grief.

I asked a former teacher I work with about that, and she said that these schedules are usually derived by the unholy interaction between two camps: school administrators and parents. The administrators have lots of degrees and theory, but haven’t ever taught a day in their lives. They pick up the idea, say, that "children learn math better after lunch when taught in two-hour blocks" from some highfalutin University study, so they implement it. Well, then parents hear this, and just shrug, until they hear that their kid has been scheduled for a morning math class, because, let’s face it, there aren’t enough math teacher to teach everyone at once. "How dare you!" they fulminate. "Why should our children be punished?", they say. "You’ve set our children up to fail!" The administrators are then forced to juggle things around so everybody gets a little slice of the after-lunch math class, nobody gets the full effect of the already dubious theory, the schedules are incredibly complex, and nobody is really happy.

Then there’s the places that have just plain bizarre concepts, like having three semesters (what?) and four trimesters. I kid you not. I’ve seen it myself. Or the guy with the title of Technology Director for a district of 10,000 students who has to have the advanced concept of the right-click explained to him. Repeatedly. For fifteen minutes straight. Or the database administrator who, when asked if she was on the Mac or Windows platform, said that she didn’t know. Where do they find these people? How did they get their jobs? I have no idea.

They’re doomed. DOOMED, I tell you!