Flexibility for Class Time

Nothing is quite so frustrating to the school administrator as the annual task of working out schedules. Ideally, different courses should be allowed differing amounts of class time: some teachers are better off lecturing large groups, others consulting with a few students at a time; some students should be allowed more unsupervised study time than others. But almost always, the flexibility that would allow such variations is utterly lacking. To match his school's resources to its students' needs, the educator is forced back to the familiar 50-minute class for every course, the same old allotment of about six class periods a day per student. Otherwise he could never make the pieces of his schedule fit together in the school week.

Now the ubiquitous computer offers the schedule maker an escape from old-fashioned routine. Programmed by Stanford Professors Dwight W. Allen and Robert V. Oakford, the university's digital giant has taught schools across the country how to build schedules out of combinations of "modules" as brief as 15 minutes in length, how to put the ideal of all but unlimited flexibility into daily practice.

Schools that subscribe to 54 (Stanford School Scheduling System) must first catalogue their resources--faculty, students, space, the curriculum to be offered: Then students, with the aid of their advisers, prepare lists of courses in which they would like to be enrolled with preferences and acceptable substitutes. The data are translated into computer language, coded, and punched onto IBM cards, then fed into the computer, which takes minutes to print out a master schedule--student schedules, teacher schedules, room-use schedules --a complete catalogue of who is to teach what, when, where and to whom.

Fatigue Factor. With the computer doing the juggling, all the different-length classes a school could not handle in the past can now be fitted neatly into place. Taking maximum advantage of available time, 54 high schools as far apart as Las Vegas, Miami and Montclair, N.J., all report similar trends in their curriculums. Foreign language instruction is being doled out in shorter instruction periods to allow for the fatigue factor of intense learning. Courses in the humanities and social sciences are being divided into large lecture groups early in the week, then broken up into small units for study with different teachers. Students doing laboratory experiments and those in mechanical arts classes have been allowed more time for individual work.

Inevitably, as the odd-length modules are fitted into the school day, some students find segments of free time hanging heavy on their hands. And that time is often misused or wasted. But most schools that have tried 54 are convinced that its flexibility offers more than enough to match any drawback. The price is high: about $4,800 for a school of 1,000 students. Without a computer, though, even to approximate 54 scheduling for the same school would cost far more--some three man-months of forbidding computation.

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