My daughter and I just had a discussion about the word “tardy”. She is 16 years old, an “A” student, and a pleasure to be around. She has been dealing with migraines, for which she has seen several doctors and for which she has tried numerous treatment protocols. This has lead to some tardies and the threat of suspensions.
I told her that she was late, not tardy. A friend who is a non-observant jew often says that he is not a “real jew”, rather he is “jew-ish”. Likewise, “tardy” sounds like a similar phrase. I told my daughter that she is not “retarded”, rather she is “tardy”.
After I said that she reminded me about her best friend’s little sister who has Downs Syndrome and how I shouldn’t joke about the word retarded. My daughter is fine, her school is a little sick.
In my high-school three tardies equaled an unexcused absence, and one unexcused meant a one step grade decrease (i.e. B+ to a B). It seemed to work pretty well.
Yeesh, when I was in high school it could easily take three minutes just to get at my locker, forget everything else. I didn’t even use the ten-minute afternoon break for a locker stop. 3 minutes to prep for and get to your next class? Not happening.
At our school in '89 - '93, we stopped by our lockers between every class. I don’t believe we were forbidden to carry a bookbag around, but it wasn’t really done. We had, I think, 5 minutes between classes. Three minutes is just silly.
I sent the email this morning, minus the wetting in class sentence ('though I kept the one about UTI’s and loss of tone). I’ll let y’all know what they say, if anything.
I’m very interested in the response on this. I know that I had a huge high school (almost 3,000 students on a campus that was almost a half-mile long, with a building that was easily a third of a mile long, if not more, plus two satellite buildings). We had block scheduling; that is, we had six classes but only took three a day, each class lasting 100 minutes. Between first and second periods, there was a 20 minute “nutrition” break, and then between second and third periods, a 35 minute lunch break.
I know that if I left my first period class, in the middle of the school, and ran to my locker at the north end, and then ran to my class at the south satellite building, it often took up almost the entire 20 minute nutrition break, depending on hallway traffic, how fast I could get my locker open, and whether a teacher caught me running and stopped me to berate me. Luckily the satellite buildings were all equipped with bathrooms of their own, so I could just go once I got there. Trying to push people into doing this kind of thing in 3 minutes astounds me, and I think it’s highly irresponsible of the school’s faculty to expect it of them.
The problem of tardiness isn’t that the idea of 3 minutes between classes isn’t enough, the problem is that the children aren’t working like the little automatons they are obviously supposed to be.
I wonder what the faculty think of the passing period as well. Unless they have prep periods every other class, they either had to stop lessons 5-10 minutes before the end of the period to get stuff put away and ready for the next class, or take the first few minutes to get stuff ready. Ideally, an instructional period should be time that you can actually teach. If the truncated passing period means that you lose time at the start and end of every class, it kind of defeats the purpose. And it would piss me off if kids were breaking stuff down ten minutes before the bell getting ready to bolt out of their seats because they didn’t have time to do this before class started. Not only that, I imagine you’ve got a million kids asking to go to the restroom during every class.
And I speak from experience… teachers have to potty as well, and I sure as hell would rather do it between classes instead of rushing through guided practice and running out mid-lesson. I’m surprised the union hasn’t weighed in on this issue. Or perhaps they have? Might be worth talking to a teacher about it, WhyNot.
Also, is it three minutes between every period? It seems like they should have at least two longer transitions - the morning break and lunch. How many times a day do kids have to make the three-minute transition?
Saturday detention punishments at my school meant grounds keeping type punishment. Pulling weeds in the baseball field, picking up trash on campus (including a Furby that had been blown to smithereens), and other unpleasant manual labor that would fill four Saturday morning hours. If you were in really big trouble, you’d have an 8-hour Saturday detention, and beyond that, well, you must have done something truly heinous to be suspended or expelled.
Despite that, the school administrators had a clear idea of how long it took to get from one class to another. On my high school’s campus, there are four different buildings, all of which are spread apart and surrounding a pond. Your locker placement was dependent upon your class ranking, and the classes were broken up (initially at least) by area of study instead of grade level. You got between 5 and 7 minutes (depended on the year) to get to your locker, get your stuff, use the bathroom, and get to class. Because we weren’t crowded, this was perfectly workable and it was rare for any of us to be late to class. I can’t imagine a 3 minute window to get to class in a school with more students in buildings with more than 2 stories to traverse.
All the public high schools in Albuquerque (and there are about 11) weigh in at about 1,500 to 2,000 students each. As far as I know, they haven’t gone to smaller schools inside a large school in the six years since I left the system.
Come to think of it, I think we got 10 minutes in high school. I had one of those large, spread out California campuses, and it took most of the 10 minutes to get down to the PE fields, and nearly that to go from English to art or science.
Also, I think only one has more than one story. The one I went to was the biggest campus in the system, with one of the buildings being about two-tenths of a mile at least away from the rest (it was a former elementary school.) The campus itself is something like 6 unconnected buildings. I routinely had to go a third of a mile from class to class. The actual campus size is (approximated by drawing a couple straight lines in Google Earth) about 6.5 acres. We had ten minutes to get from class to class, and that could be a trick at times if you had to go all the way from one end of the campus to the other.
Even 1400 would be pretty massive by my standards. Mine was on the big side, at 900 or so. In this list of West Australian schools, “over 1200” is the top category, and there aren’t too many of them either.
However, given that WhyKid’s school is only just pushing 600, this all turns out to be not particularly relevant anyway! I’d call that “normal sized”
