> Quite useful on days the hours/rooms get switched around because a teacher is on leave.
> Your paper planner won't inform you that your first hour is in another building tomorrow or that the teacher is ill (and yes, the schedules would change less than 12 hours in advance).
That seems like a really odd way of handling it, and more confusing than it needs to be. For me the class was assigned to a specific room, not the teacher - so it never moved. If we had a substitute, they'd just be in the normal room instead of the usual teacher. If they couldn't get one in time, then either an administrator would bring us to study hall (highschool) or after 10 minutes we'd just leave assuming they couldn't make it (college).
I guess it's a way of handling it that's enabled by the fact that the calendars are electronic. It could be that this way is easier for the school staff, but honestly I have no idea and can't even begin to guess, really.
Even in 2024, schools in major cities experience staffing shortages where there are not enough supposedly-qualified adults to supervise all of the students in their originally scheduled classrooms.
"Solution": class X, Y, and Z all meet in Lunchroom W on Wednesday so one adult can supervise all of them.
Schools are different all over the world. I believe rooms were assigned to teachers as much as possible, but not every teacher needed a room all day every day so there was the occasional change-up. For instance, sometimes biology/chemistry/physics needing the few lab rooms for experiments, and those had to be scheduled in somehow. That also caused other rooms to bump every now and then.
Generally, a teacher not showing up was no real reason for skipping class (no matter how much urban myths said otherwise) but if the absence was known in advance we'd get a free hour. Most kids used those for some extra homework time or to just hang out, unless the free hour lined up with the start or the end of the day.
We didn't really have study hall, just the normal areas in school that you'd also hang out in during breaks (or holes in the schedule, as older kids with personal schedules occasionally had).
In university this rarely happened, most people would leave after about 30 minutes because a lot of them traveled half an hour or more to get there in the first place. People were a lot less willing to abandon classes once they were paying out of their own pocket for them.
> Your paper planner won't inform you that your first hour is in another building tomorrow or that the teacher is ill (and yes, the schedules would change less than 12 hours in advance).
That seems like a really odd way of handling it, and more confusing than it needs to be. For me the class was assigned to a specific room, not the teacher - so it never moved. If we had a substitute, they'd just be in the normal room instead of the usual teacher. If they couldn't get one in time, then either an administrator would bring us to study hall (highschool) or after 10 minutes we'd just leave assuming they couldn't make it (college).