School timetable


A school timetable is a table for coordinating these four elements:
Other factors include the subject of the class, and the type of classrooms available.
School timetables usually cycle every week or every fortnight. The phrase "school timetables" largely refers to high schools, because primary schools typically have simple structures.

High school

High school timetables are quite different from university timetables. The main difference is that in high schools, students have to be occupied and supervised every hour of the school day, or nearly every hour. Also, high school teachers generally have much higher teaching loads than is the case in universities. As a result, it is generally considered that university timetables involve more human judgement whereas high school timetabling is a more computationally intensive task, see constraint satisfaction problem.
Primary school typically has timetables, however the timetable is usually so simple that it can be constructed manually or in a basic spreadsheet package.
In some countries and regions, such as China and East Africa, high school students are not given any choice in subjects, and this makes timetabling easy - the students can remain in the one room all day while the teachers rotate.
In other countries, such as United States, the whole school is typically run on a system of units, where each subject has the same number of lessons per cycle and subjects are placed into 'lines'. This also makes timetabling easy.
In countries, such as Australia, Canada, and most European countries, there generally exists a combination of the variants above, and timetables can be extremely difficult to construct. The process can take weeks of effort and typically computers are needed in the process.

Problems and issues

The task of constructing a high school timetable involves the following issues :
Another definition for a split class is when a teacher must teach two different grade levels in one period. This often occurs with less popular subjects, which are not big enough to be made into separate classes. Split classes are generally deemed highly undesirable.
A central issue which exists both in the American model and the European model is to provide an individualised curriculum for each student that provides for his/her strengths, weaknesses and personal preferences. Certain subjects lend themselves to setting, or organising students into ability groups. Mathematics is a good example, where some students in the same age range may be years ahead of their peers. There are other subjects where students benefit from placement in mixed ability groups. This is an ongoing debate amongst teachers.
It is widely believed that students should have a broad curriculum in their early years at school but that it should become increasingly specialised and deeper as they get older.
Thus, many secondary schools introduce "options" or "electives", typically at the age of 14. This presents the timetabler with many restrictions, since in any one teaching period several different subject specialists will be teaching that group of students. This is in contrast to the example above – Mathematics – where the same group will all be taught by mathematics specialists.
The terminology used in Australia is: 'class' is a group of students numbering typically 25 or less students, who will study the subject together. 'Classes' are arranged into 'lines' such that all the classes within one line will run at the same times. A 'course' may have 1 class or may have more, and if it has more, these classes can be in the same line or in different lines. Terminology in USA is: 'section' instead of 'class' and 'block' instead of 'line'.
There are many schools that fix their option blocks such that students must choose one subject in each block. This is a very poor way of approaching the problem, although in small schools staffing restrictions make it essential.
In larger schools, there is usually sufficient flexibility in staffing to allow students a free choice and staffing can then be adjusted accordingly. Large schools have the additional advantage that they can offer a wider range of subjects including those that only small numbers of students select.
The downside is that the bigger a school becomes, the less intimate it becomes. In a school of 300 students, it is reasonable to suppose that every individual student and teacher can "know" each other. In a school of 1,500 or more, this is practically impossible. A fair compromise is in the range of 700-1200.
For the timetabler, once the number of lessons for each subject are agreed, the sets and option blocks are the first thing to establish and fix. These can be thought of as stones in a river, and once fixed, the rest of the timetable flows around these mainly unmoveable lumps. This is especially true with courses that last more than one year, where it is preferable to have continuity with the same group and the same teacher.
Constructing a secondary school timetable is complex but is more a problem of persistence than intelligence. In the long process it requires thousands of decisions, some of which are obscure in the extreme. Retaining flexibility as that process develops is the key issue.
Constructing a large secondary school’s timetable is not simply a case of filling in a matrix, difficult though that often is. The timetable determines the movements of many hundreds of people for a year of their lives. All timetables are compromises between a myriad of differing interests and preferences. It requires an intimate knowledge of the detail of the lives of that community. It is not firstly a mathematical or organisational problem, it is a human one.

Abbreviations

In the United States «TTh» and «MW» or «M-W» are used as unofficial short-hands for «Tuesdays and Thursdays» and «Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays». They are utilized when columns need to be very narrow on tables where the extra characters would create an unintended new row or other unwanted formatting issues. In many colleges in the US the standard three credit semester course meets either on Monday, Wednesday and Friday or on Tuesday and Thursday. The former is often written in schedule bulletins as simply MWF, the latter TTh. The version with a hyphen can be confusing as the hyphen means inclusive whereas a comma creates a list. For example, M-F means Monday through Friday, but T, TH means Tuesday and Thursday only.