Slashdot Mirror
Bug Means High School Students' Schedule Errors May Last Days
Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that thousands of high school students in Prince George's County missed a third day of classes Wednesday, and school officials said it could take more than a week to sort out the chaos caused by a computerized class-scheduling system as students were placed in gyms, auditoriums, cafeterias, libraries and classes they didn't want or need at high schools across the county and their parents' fury over the logistical nightmare rose. 'The school year comes up the same time every year,' said Carolyn Oliver, the mother of a 16-year-old senior who spent Wednesday in the senior lounge at Bowie High School. 'When I heard they didn't have schedules, I was like, "What have they been doing all summer?"' When school opened Monday, about 8,000 high school students had no class schedules and were sent to wait in holding spaces while administrators tried to sort things out." (More below.)
One must know which classes to ditch.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
My wife teaches Journalism at a low income high school in Dallas. A few days before school started she was worried about scheduling and so were her coworkers since an online system they're suppose to be using had no schedules in it. Her first day was met with 60 kids in one of her Journalism class, only 5 had orginially signed up. This is a very poor school ripe with gangs which have to be kept apart but with the scheduling farked all the kids were all mixed together. She was in tears on the phone with me worried that if a fight broke out she wouldn't be able to get out of her room since she has to cross the entire class to get from her desk to the door. Her school won't let her carry a concealed weopen, I want her to carry my pistol but I'm afraid if she gets caught with it there would be criminal charges filed.
The second day she submitted about 200 schedule changes to the counselors and had managed to get her class size down to 40. Any known bad kids she just told to leave her class, they just leave school and never come back (the first week or so is the worst then the trouble makers just stop showing up).
Today she showed 1/2 her students a video and tried to teach the other half, I'm guessing she'll do the same tomorrow but switch halves.
As of right now next Monday is declared a "do over first day of school" and the schedules are promised to be fixed. No one believes it though.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
I suspect the schools don't run the scheduler until a few days before school actually starts - Teachers can die (happened my senior year), quit, not show up for work, classrooms may be unavailable for many reasons, etc... On top of this, they don't actually know how many students are going to show up until registration closes (typically a week before class starts).
What does this teenage-Randian rant have to do with the parent comment? The article asks what schools were doing all summer, and the comment is that they were not working, because they weren't employed. Your argument that they shouldn't have ever been employed because omg RON PAUL isn't actually relevant to that point.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Wouldn't that have been a perfect time to conduct audits and make sure everything was ready for the students to arrive?
I'm guessing you haven't worked in a public school? Two years ago I got my classroom assignment 3 days before students showed up. My co-worker had 1 day. Instead of curriculum planning, we spent the time running around the halls trying to find desks for students, the teacher's manuals for our books, get appropriate keys, etc.
Oh, and we also had a part time counselor in charge of 300+ students' schedules at our school and another 300+ at our neighbor school. A student shows up who hasn't registered? The secretary will put her in some temporary classes until a week later when the counselor can actually review her transcript and place her accordingly.
No one is sitting around that week. There's a thousand jobs that need to be done, but the districts keep cutting support staff and putting it on the shoulders of teachers and counselors. I wouldn't be quick to blame anyone in that school building.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
http://xkcd.com/327/ That fuckin' kid. :|
What kind of high school is THIS? We were lucky to have basic computer classes when i was in high school. Sewing and piano? Spoiled bastards.
My high school had sewing and piano, those classes were held on Thursdays (aka "foie gras and caviar day" at the cafeteria, between yachting class and equestrianism.
Ha, actually I am a proud product of the New York City public school system, where we counted ourselves lucky if the history books were published late enough to let us know when WW2 ended.
RON PAUL is always relevant.
Both of my kids are in Prince Georges County public schools. They are both in the science and technology magnet program at Eleanor Roosevelt HS. Two years ago, they used mygradebook.com for teachers to use, and it was a breeze to check on grades, see what assignments were due (and what assignments were missing), etc. It was an easy sytem to use, and worked well. Last year ERHS was forced to use the SchoolMax system. It was a disaster. So I'm not surprised that the problem was caused by the SchoolMax software.
"Instruction" isn't in the teacher contract. (I should know - I signed 5 of them before I wised up.) The wording is "student contact days" and "student contact periods".
My school ran into the same thing with snow days. If we had 2/3 of the students in school for more than a half-day, it counted as a "school day", according to the state and the district. If the weather was bad, send the kids to school. If it gets worse, we send them home at noon, and it doesn't count as a snow day, and we don't have to go a day later into the summer.
School is NOT about "instruction". If you think that, you're sorely misled. School is about a few major things:
1) Basic workplace skills. Reading, writing, addition and subtraction, showing up on time, dealing with your boss.
2) Babysitting for parents who at are work.
3) Learning to deal with people.
4) Learning to take tests. (This is the big one!)
One of the things that struck me most, going back into a high school after being out for almost a decade, was that the kids were TOTALLY unable to think. In fact, I went out and a had a few drinks with a woman who was student-teaching in my building. She was working on both a HS and Elementary certification, so was student teaching in both schools. She was told by an Elementary school math teacher that her test was inappropriate, because "The kids aren't used to that. They are used to being told stuff, and the test sees whether or not they remember it. They aren't used to having to think about it and use it." I would have called BS on that, but she had a few drinks in her and was shaking with rage as she recounted that, so I took it as near the truth.
Einstein once said, ""The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." If it was true then, it's definitely true now.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
But why are many of the people protesting against government run health insurance on Medicare, and express a high level of satisfaction with it? Same with Medicaid. Same with the US Postal Service (Obama's ignorant quip not withstanding), which I've certainly found easier to deal with than Fedex? Not to even delve into how we (in general) trust the government for security, domestic and abroad, collecting taxes without paying the head of the IRS one out of every ~$700 tax dollars every year (actual number for the CEO of United health care of US health care expenditure)?
Off the top of my head, I can't think of a national situation where there's a private company providing a better service than a public equivalent (and this is ignoring the contract asymmetry where Enron is allowed to criminally game the market and the state can't abrogate the contracts, yet the private firm can just say "oops, but our owners have limited liability" and declare bankruptcy.. which abrogates their current contracts). I have a feeling this was different in the 70's and 80s, that government was really a lot less efficient than it is now, or else I doubt Reagan would have had such pull. But I was born just around when Reagen was first elected, and in my adult life the vast majority of the arbitrary, caustic and inefficient bureaucracy that I've encountered has been in the private sector.
While the surest means of preventing excess is a lot of people paying attention to politics, and being vocal... the idea that the current proposals are generating so much vitriol while Bush's Medicare 'reform' that prohibits negotiating drug prices with pharmaceutical companies sure has the appearance of an irrational double standard.