Clashes

Between Scylla and Charybdis, a ship might be shattered or unmanned. There is always a price to pay. Torn by the many demands of the timetable, one can also be scattered to the winds and lose one's mind or sense of self. A diary is no help; what calendar can help when the days are all too confused and messed up?

Problem Slots

The problem, of course, is time-tabling. I have fourteen student classes a week. I do not have enough slots for various reasons. I have to get them to move around a bit. It is troublesome. It is a happy problem. But it is a galling one. They come from everywhere. They require me in several places. I am not transcendent enough. I laugh a lot when I think about how different it is from my last place of work.

The Space Machine

When you set up scheduling software to create a timetable for an organization, you have to first define all the entities and their properties. According to the timetabling guide I wrote, you begin with stuff you are sure will be there — classrooms and their capacities (and availabilities, since not all classrooms are available at all times); other facilities such as canteens (and how many classes ought to be free at any given time); timeslots (bearing in mind that people should have breaks and that school must come to an end within a reasonable time).

Then, as the CEO makes up his mind about how many classes to have, and how many students will be in each class, and whether certain departments (ahem) should be allowed to split classes so that each teacher gets a class of about 10-15 students instead of 30, you colour-code everything.

What was unusual about preparing for 2006 was that nobody knew how many classrooms would be available; in fact, nobody knew where some of those classrooms were, and whether there would be equipment, air-conditioning, or even desks and chairs when you got to the place where a classroom was supposed to be. Even more unusual was the assertion made by a member of senior staff that students only needed a 20-minute break between classes.

Well, there's nothing wrong with a 20-minute break. I used to have breaks that short. However, the new school was a massive place. I used a pedometer to find out effectively how big — and I found I was walking 5 km at least, every day. Somehow, space had been folded into a rather peculiar topology which looked big, felt small, and was even bigger than expected. Ho ho; students were always late for classes, unless they weren't and their teachers were.

The Time Machine

Many years ago, I wrote up a set of guidelines for timetabling one of the more complex educational schedules in the country. It was nowhere as complex as a university timetable, but it was pretty messy as high school schedules go. I included guidelines such as not allowing teachers or students to go more than about three hours without a break, guidelines for not having too many periods of the same subject in the same day, and so on.

Although the timetabling itself was done mainly by software, the point of the guidelines was to reduce the number of possible software-generated outcomes which were not human-friendly. For this, humans had to think about what constituted human-unfriendly, and where rules had to be broken if no outcome could be found by the software. We also had to gather data which would make us knowledgeable enough to break constraints, eliminate pointless constraints, or alter constraints that were 'nice to have' but were making the job literally impossible.

When I produced my first timetabling report, the boss remarked that he had never seen a timetabling committee produce a timetabling report. This made me feel uncomfortable. I've always believed that any committee set up to carry out a given task or function should report on its ideas, considerations, actions, follow-up and other relevant matters. Minimally, such reporting ought to be submitted to oversight every six months. I used to do this for every committee I chaired.

But then, I was told that my report was controversial because it contained too many details and ruffled too many feathers. I suspect this was because I had included a section highlighting inefficiencies and what could be done about them.

One such inefficiency was the hiring of teachers in excess of the number required for the teaching periods available. This allowed the offloading of teachers for undefined general tasks. Some departments were more culpable than others. The more 'innocent' or naïve departmental heads were actually allowing their teachers to absorb the workload of these departments. Some struck back by counter-offloading.

I assessed the cost to the school budget at a fairly large figure. It would have been enough to pay for a hefty bonus for everyone, if we had not hired so many extra teachers. It would have been more than enough to pay for the science lab equipment which I had been told there was 'insufficient budget for'.

When I highlighted this particular fact, I was waffled at and told not to worry. After all, it wasn't my money, they said.

Two years later and after my second round of timetabling committee reports, I was 'rotated' out of the chair. Fortunately, I kept records. I had been a good 'time machine'.