1. Introduction
2. Christmas Adam and other Adam Holidays
3. Darren Miller's Long Weekend
4. My Own Calendar Experiences
5. Possible Solutions Within the Gregorian Calendar
6. Possible Calendar Reform Solutions
7. The Gaia Calendar, Revisited
8. Conclusion
4. My Own Calendar Experiences
5. Possible Solutions Within the Gregorian Calendar
6. Possible Calendar Reform Solutions
7. The Gaia Calendar, Revisited
8. Conclusion
Introduction
This is the first of my three winter break posts. Today is December 26th, the day after Christmas -- also known as Boxing Day in some English-speaking countries.
One week ago today, one of the last classes I subbed in was a special needs class. These students had a short reading assignment on holiday traditions around the world. That day, they read a letter from an Australian pen pal who described how his family celebrated Christmas -- and Boxing Day. I learned that in Australia today, many people had barbecues and attended cricket matches. (Of course, we must remember that down under, Christmas and Boxing Day are summer holidays.)
I devote today's post to the late brother of Fawn Nguyen. It's always sad to lose a family member, especially around the holidays:
In Nguyen's post, she describes an academic award she received four decades ago (in math, of course) and tells the story of how her Vietnamese name Phuong became the Anglicized Fawn.
Christmas Adam and other Adam Holidays
It is my tradition to celebrate New Year's Day by discussing several calendar-related topics in my posts between Christmas and New Year's. This year is no exception. I'm adding the "Calendar" label to this post. (Note: I try to avoid religion on the blog, except in Calendar-labeled post. So expect religion to be mentioned here aplenty.)
In my last post, I mentioned how December 23rd is sometimes known as "Christmas Adam," because it's the day before Christmas Eve. We can generalize this idea -- the Adam of any holiday falls two days before the holiday, while the Eve of that holiday is the day before that holiday.
Sometimes the Adam of a holiday has a special name of its own. We've already encountered one such day -- Christmas Adam is also known as "Festivus." Here are a few more interesting Adam days:
- Valentine's Adam is also Lincoln's Birthday. (Before the creation of "President's Day," the 12th itself was a day when businesses closed.
- St. Patrick's Adam is the Ides of March.
- Easter Adam is Good Friday. (According to Christians, the crucifixion occurred on the Adam of the resurrection.)
- Independence Adam is July 2nd -- the day that our President John Adams originally foresaw as the anniversary festival before it settled on the fourth. (In that case, we should probably call it Independence Adams after the President.)
- And of course, Thanksgiving Adam is Floyd Thursby Day.
Sadly, Pi Day just barely misses being St. Patrick's Adam. But third Pi Day in November is usually Veteran's Eve, but Leap Day causes Third Pi Day to land on Veteran's Adam instead.
Most of our other holidays fall on Monday, so each has an Adam on Saturday. This is significant only when dating events that take place over the three-day weekend -- for example, the first day of college football for most teams is Labor Adam (though a few start earlier).
I'll get back to Adam holidays later in this post.
Darren Miller's Long Weekend
I'm loath to bring up politics again. But since I read the Joanne Jacobs website (in order to see what traditionalists are thinking) and Darren Miller of (political) Right on the Left Coast is a frequent contributor there, I end up reading so many of Miller's posts. Anyway, back in October he blogged about the school calendar, and so I wish to bring it up in today's Calendar post:
I've been thinking about what the ideal school calendar might look like. Indeed, this is how Miller begins his post -- thinking back to the days when school started after Labor Day. Now his school starts in August, but with more holidays:
In 1975, my aunt and I returned from visiting my mother in Germany. We landed on August 27th, my aunt's birthday (her geburtstag, as it were). When I got home there was still time to go school shopping for new clothes for the upcoming school year, and to adjust to the time zone.
Whether to start school in August or September is an example of a change to the school calendar that can be made within the context of our Gregorian Calendar. Other possible changes require actual Calendar Reform. For example, we might wish to keep the five-day week but extend every weekend to three days. This requires a Calendar Reform with eight-day weeks.
I enjoy Calendar Reform, but this is an education blog. With every proposed calendar, I like to see what its effect would be on the school year. In this post I'm considering the reverse -- first, what is the optimal school calendar, and second, what sort of Calendar Reform is needed to implement it?
Anyway, Miller describes a long weekend that his school held in October -- and the problems that it led to:
A few years ago, someone in my district administration noticed that, since school started in mid-August, both teachers and students started taking days off in October. Thus was born the idea of giving a 4-day weekend in early October; we get a chance to recharge the batteries, so the theory goes, and should be able to make it until the next holiday, Veterans Day. By giving teachers the days off we eliminate a spate of days of not having enough substitute teachers, and by giving students the days off we cut down on unexcused absences and avoid losing state funding, which depends on attendance. What can go wrong? Any economist could have predicted that there would be a number of teachers out last Thursday, and those economists would have been correct!
OK, so Miller mentions subs and unexcused absences here. This suggests a definition of "ideal school calendar" -- it's one that seeks to minimize the number of teacher and student absences. Calendars with many days of work without a day off, or many weeks of work without a vacation, are prone to absences because teachers and students get tired.
We know that Fridays often lead to more subs because teachers who get sick on Thursday don't wish to return to work on Friday. It's easy to see how a long weekend (such as the four-day October weekend mentioned in the post above) can lead to even more absences -- a teacher who gets sick the preceding Wednesday definitely wouldn't want to return on Thursday. So that's one reason for the number of absences to spike the Thursday before the long weekend.
But notice that we still haven't quite defined what the ideal school calendar is. Suppose Miller's district has 1000 teachers. Suppose that before the four-day weekend was introduced, about 5% (that is, 50) teachers were absent each of the four Fridays in October. But then with the long weekend, 15% (or 150) teachers were absent on the Thursday before the long weekend.
So which is worse -- 200 absences on the four Fridays, or 150 absences on a single Thursday. On one hand, 150 is less than 200 total absences. But on the other, the single Thursday requires 150 subs -- and suppose that there are only 100 subs in the district. In other words, there's a difference between minimizing the total absences (over a month) and minimizing the peak absences (on a single day). In fact, we see that introducing the four-day weekend reduces the total absences, but having the long stretch without holidays reduces the peak. In his post, Miller mentions both the total and the peak, but it might be that the twin goals of minimizing them both are at odds with each other.
But notice that Miller begins this paragraph by mentioning the August school start. Thus he implies that if school still began after Labor Day, teachers can make it all the way to Veteran's Day without taking extra days off or needing a four-day weekend in October. That is, the way to minimize both total absences and peak absences is to start after Labor Day.
Yet we already know why more schools start in August. It's not October that's the problem -- it's December and January, and the problems associated with having finals after winter break. But I don't see any simple way to eliminate this problem. We could insert an extra month between Labor Day and Christmas (either via Calendar Reform with a new month somewhere between September and December, or keeping the Gregorian Calendar but changing Labor Day to August). That solves the finals problem, but it doesn't reduce the urge to take off extra days in October.
My Own Calendar Experiences
I've been subbing a lot lately, including the last day(s) before breaks and first day(s) after break. So we ask, have I observed any spikes in absences (whether teacher or student) on those days?
Well, this year I spent the last days before both spring and winter break at a continuation school. It's known that many students their have poor attendance records (part of the reason that they've been sent to a continuation school). There were many absences those days, but not significantly more than a typical day at that school.
The last day before Thanksgiving break was different. That day (a Friday) I was at a comprehensive high school, but there was a credible threat made at the school on Thursday. Thus there were many student absences both Thursday and Friday, and there was additional police presence. Thus it's difficult for me to gauge student attendance leading up to the breaks since there were extenuating circumstances in each case.
On the other hand, I do know something about teacher absences during those weeks. I subbed for a math teacher who was out the entire week after Thanksgiving. She was out because her daughter was in the hospital in another state. I also heard of another teacher who had scheduled surgery for the week before winter break.
That's another thing that Miller doesn't mention in his post -- teacher doctor visits. Both he and Floyd Thursby criticize teachers who take days off to go to the doctor instead of going during break. But they forget that doctors wish to take days off as well. Think about it -- there are ten weekdays this year during winter break, from December 23rd to January 3rd. But two of those days are holidays on which no doctor will work (December 25th and January 1st). The Eves are likely to be taken off by doctors -- and possibly the Adams as well, since they fall on Mondays. That doesn't leave many days during the break when doctors' offices are open.
Moreover, if a teacher knows that she will need three weeks for surgery and recovery, then it's smart to schedule it for the week before winter break, so that the three weeks needed include two weeks of break and only one week of school. The problem is that the extra week will invariably be the week before the break, thus contributing to the peak of subs needed to cover the last week. It's impossible for a teacher to take three weeks to recover from surgery -- two weeks of break and one week far away from the break.
This suggests that some schedule problems are impossible to avoid. When it comes to recovering from illness or surgery, it's actually better to take extra days off near breaks to do so in order for the break to contribute to the recovery time. While that reduces the total number of days lost to subs, it increases the need for subs on peak days surrounding the breaks.
And of course, notice that Miller mentions economics in his post:
Any economist could have predicted that there would be a number of teachers out last Thursday, and those economists would have been correct!
We're discussing workers and their schedules, hence the relevance of economics here. But another issue related to economics is supply and demand -- as in airline tickets. During holidays, demand for tickets often exceeds supply. Passengers often have to book flights on the Adams of major holidays when flights on the Eves are sold out. This usually isn't a problem for Thanksgiving in my districts, since we get the entire week off, but it is a problem for Floyd Thursby's district, where school is open on Thanksgiving Adam. And as we're well aware, in New York there is school on both Thanksgiving Eve and Christmas Adam (in years when the 23rd falls on Tuesday-Friday), which adds to the travel nightmare for teachers, students, and parents.
Possible Solutions Within the Gregorian Calendar
Our goal here is to schedule a 180-day school year such as to minimize both the total number of teacher (and student) absences and the peak number of absences.
Two possible but impractical solutions jump out at us. One way to minimize the peak absences is just to have 180 straight days of school followed by a 185-day vacation. Let's see -- January through June add up to 181 days, so let's just start on January 2nd. Most of the major holidays fall between Independence Day and New Year's Day anyway -- and with only one long break, there's only one "last day/week before break" that would encourage teachers to take extra peak absences.
Of course it won't work. No one wants to work 180 consecutive days, even with six months off. And it also ignores the concept of sabbath -- a day off every week for religious purposes.
The other impractical solution is to alternate the whole year between work and rest. For example, we might have school on even days and take odd days off. This almost gives us 180 days (twelve months with 15 days of school each month), except that there's no February 30th, so it's only 179 days. As a bonus, many major holidays are on odd days anyway (January 1st, November 11th, December 25th, and others like both October 31st/November 1st as a bonus). Every day is the last day before an off day, so there's no reason to take an extra day off as a bridge to the weekend.
But of course it won't work either. We like having more than one (occasionally two) days off at a time for vacations and so forth. And of course, this plan doesn't respect the sabbath either.
One realistic solution in this mold might be to reduce the school week to four days. Since 180 equals 45 times 4, this leaves 52 minus 45, or seven weeks for vacation. We might spread these out so that we have one week off at Thanksgiving and two weeks off for winter, spring, and summer breaks. If we choose Tuesday-Friday as the work week, then this takes care of Monday holidays. Assuming that the two weeks of summer break include the Fourth of July, this leaves only Veteran's Day (which can fall on any day of the week) as the only problematic holiday. (Of course, we can solve this simply by redefining Vets Day as the second Monday in November.)
The hope here is that with every weekend having three days, there's less need for a breather when there are long stretches between holidays (such as Labor Day-Veteran's Day or the Big March). And so perhaps both the peak and total absences can be minimized with this solution.
Possible Calendar Reform Solutions
This last solution fits within our Gregorian Calendar -- specifically its seven-day week. That's because it's based on four school days and three rest days. If we wish to improve upon this solution, then we must abandon the seven-day week.
For example, perhaps a three-day weekend isn't enough -- even if every weekend were three days, teachers might still wish to take extra days off. So let's make the weekend four days. This still might not be enough -- consider Miller's Thursday in October problem, but maybe if every weekend were four days, there would be no need to take a fifth day off on one particular weekend in October.
The "sick on Thursday" problem that I mentioned above (that is, teachers take an ordinary Friday off if they get sick on Thursday) will persist regardless of the week length -- no solution can make it disappear completely. But maybe we can at least reduce it by extending the week length -- if there were a six-day workweek, then only 1/6 of those days would be "Friday" rather than 1/5, so only 1/6 of the days would require as many subs as an ordinary Friday.
But six days makes for a long workweek. Teachers and students might take extra days off midweek to avoid having six days of school in a row (similar to Miller's October problem). So let's now add an extra day off in the middle of the week.
That gives us three days of school, one rest day, three more rest days, and a four-day weekend. This gives us a grand total of eleven days per week. So what we need, then, is a Calendar Reform that's based on eleven-day weeks.
And I know one such calendar -- my Eleven Calendar, first published on this blog.
OK, I admit this is partly an excuse to mention the Eleven Calendar again. But when I first came up with that calendar, I had something like this in mind. I wanted there to be six days per school week in order to make it fit block schedules more easily, but I knew that six-day weeks would be tough unless we either extend the weekend, add a midweek day off, or both. Oh, and I wanted the total to be eleven since it would be a truly original calendar -- no one else had a 11-day week. Hence I invented the Eleven Calendar.
Of course, my solution is still not a perfect solution. For example, I added the midweek rest day in order to avoid having six straight school days. But would that result in the day before the rest day becoming a second Friday (that is, with as many teacher absences as a Friday)? If so, then that would defeat the purpose of having six-day weeks. (The answer might be intermediate -- it could be that there are fewer absences on the midweek "Friday" than on the real "Friday," yet more than the other days of the week -- enough to outweigh the advantage of having 1/6 of all school days being true "Fridays" instead of 1/5.)
Then again, there's no way to experiment to see whether 11-day weeks might work, since I can't change the length of the week to 11 days just to find out.
If 11 days per week isn't optimal, perhaps we might be able to tweak it a little. I notice that there are a number of new 10-day calendars at the Calendar Wiki website:
https://calendars.wikia.org/wiki/Alternative_and_Proposed_Calendars
Maybe ten days will work better than eleven. The question is, do we eliminate a school day, the midweek rest day, or a weekend day to get to ten days? Again, which week length will minimize the total and peek absences?
The Gaia Calendar, Revisited
Last year for my Calendar Reform post, I linked to several lunisolar calendars and mentioned the Gaia Calendar as a possible calendar. It had an interesting but complicated Leap Month rule -- and I made several suggestions to simplify the Leap Month rule, based on another calendar that I had read about (the Meyer-Palmer Solilunar Calendar).
Well, the inventor of the calendar has taken my suggestions to heart. Here is a link to a new version of his calendar:
https://www.peristanom.org/p/calendar.html
This marks the second time that I've helped out a Calendar Reformer. (The first time was for the Andrew Usher Leap Week Calendar.) In both cases, my contribution was to simply the Leap Unit (that is, Leap Week or Leap Month) rules. My real baby is the Eleven Calendar.
Conclusion
And that is my goal for my next post, to be posted tomorrow. I will continue to develop the Eleven Calendar by adding suggestions for day names, month names, and what the 11-day week looks like.
I wish you many condolences for your recent loss, Phuong Nguyen.
Well, this year I spent the last days before both spring and winter break at a continuation school. It's known that many students their have poor attendance records (part of the reason that they've been sent to a continuation school). There were many absences those days, but not significantly more than a typical day at that school.
The last day before Thanksgiving break was different. That day (a Friday) I was at a comprehensive high school, but there was a credible threat made at the school on Thursday. Thus there were many student absences both Thursday and Friday, and there was additional police presence. Thus it's difficult for me to gauge student attendance leading up to the breaks since there were extenuating circumstances in each case.
On the other hand, I do know something about teacher absences during those weeks. I subbed for a math teacher who was out the entire week after Thanksgiving. She was out because her daughter was in the hospital in another state. I also heard of another teacher who had scheduled surgery for the week before winter break.
That's another thing that Miller doesn't mention in his post -- teacher doctor visits. Both he and Floyd Thursby criticize teachers who take days off to go to the doctor instead of going during break. But they forget that doctors wish to take days off as well. Think about it -- there are ten weekdays this year during winter break, from December 23rd to January 3rd. But two of those days are holidays on which no doctor will work (December 25th and January 1st). The Eves are likely to be taken off by doctors -- and possibly the Adams as well, since they fall on Mondays. That doesn't leave many days during the break when doctors' offices are open.
Moreover, if a teacher knows that she will need three weeks for surgery and recovery, then it's smart to schedule it for the week before winter break, so that the three weeks needed include two weeks of break and only one week of school. The problem is that the extra week will invariably be the week before the break, thus contributing to the peak of subs needed to cover the last week. It's impossible for a teacher to take three weeks to recover from surgery -- two weeks of break and one week far away from the break.
This suggests that some schedule problems are impossible to avoid. When it comes to recovering from illness or surgery, it's actually better to take extra days off near breaks to do so in order for the break to contribute to the recovery time. While that reduces the total number of days lost to subs, it increases the need for subs on peak days surrounding the breaks.
And of course, notice that Miller mentions economics in his post:
Any economist could have predicted that there would be a number of teachers out last Thursday, and those economists would have been correct!
We're discussing workers and their schedules, hence the relevance of economics here. But another issue related to economics is supply and demand -- as in airline tickets. During holidays, demand for tickets often exceeds supply. Passengers often have to book flights on the Adams of major holidays when flights on the Eves are sold out. This usually isn't a problem for Thanksgiving in my districts, since we get the entire week off, but it is a problem for Floyd Thursby's district, where school is open on Thanksgiving Adam. And as we're well aware, in New York there is school on both Thanksgiving Eve and Christmas Adam (in years when the 23rd falls on Tuesday-Friday), which adds to the travel nightmare for teachers, students, and parents.
Possible Solutions Within the Gregorian Calendar
Our goal here is to schedule a 180-day school year such as to minimize both the total number of teacher (and student) absences and the peak number of absences.
Two possible but impractical solutions jump out at us. One way to minimize the peak absences is just to have 180 straight days of school followed by a 185-day vacation. Let's see -- January through June add up to 181 days, so let's just start on January 2nd. Most of the major holidays fall between Independence Day and New Year's Day anyway -- and with only one long break, there's only one "last day/week before break" that would encourage teachers to take extra peak absences.
Of course it won't work. No one wants to work 180 consecutive days, even with six months off. And it also ignores the concept of sabbath -- a day off every week for religious purposes.
The other impractical solution is to alternate the whole year between work and rest. For example, we might have school on even days and take odd days off. This almost gives us 180 days (twelve months with 15 days of school each month), except that there's no February 30th, so it's only 179 days. As a bonus, many major holidays are on odd days anyway (January 1st, November 11th, December 25th, and others like both October 31st/November 1st as a bonus). Every day is the last day before an off day, so there's no reason to take an extra day off as a bridge to the weekend.
But of course it won't work either. We like having more than one (occasionally two) days off at a time for vacations and so forth. And of course, this plan doesn't respect the sabbath either.
One realistic solution in this mold might be to reduce the school week to four days. Since 180 equals 45 times 4, this leaves 52 minus 45, or seven weeks for vacation. We might spread these out so that we have one week off at Thanksgiving and two weeks off for winter, spring, and summer breaks. If we choose Tuesday-Friday as the work week, then this takes care of Monday holidays. Assuming that the two weeks of summer break include the Fourth of July, this leaves only Veteran's Day (which can fall on any day of the week) as the only problematic holiday. (Of course, we can solve this simply by redefining Vets Day as the second Monday in November.)
The hope here is that with every weekend having three days, there's less need for a breather when there are long stretches between holidays (such as Labor Day-Veteran's Day or the Big March). And so perhaps both the peak and total absences can be minimized with this solution.
Possible Calendar Reform Solutions
This last solution fits within our Gregorian Calendar -- specifically its seven-day week. That's because it's based on four school days and three rest days. If we wish to improve upon this solution, then we must abandon the seven-day week.
For example, perhaps a three-day weekend isn't enough -- even if every weekend were three days, teachers might still wish to take extra days off. So let's make the weekend four days. This still might not be enough -- consider Miller's Thursday in October problem, but maybe if every weekend were four days, there would be no need to take a fifth day off on one particular weekend in October.
The "sick on Thursday" problem that I mentioned above (that is, teachers take an ordinary Friday off if they get sick on Thursday) will persist regardless of the week length -- no solution can make it disappear completely. But maybe we can at least reduce it by extending the week length -- if there were a six-day workweek, then only 1/6 of those days would be "Friday" rather than 1/5, so only 1/6 of the days would require as many subs as an ordinary Friday.
But six days makes for a long workweek. Teachers and students might take extra days off midweek to avoid having six days of school in a row (similar to Miller's October problem). So let's now add an extra day off in the middle of the week.
That gives us three days of school, one rest day, three more rest days, and a four-day weekend. This gives us a grand total of eleven days per week. So what we need, then, is a Calendar Reform that's based on eleven-day weeks.
And I know one such calendar -- my Eleven Calendar, first published on this blog.
OK, I admit this is partly an excuse to mention the Eleven Calendar again. But when I first came up with that calendar, I had something like this in mind. I wanted there to be six days per school week in order to make it fit block schedules more easily, but I knew that six-day weeks would be tough unless we either extend the weekend, add a midweek day off, or both. Oh, and I wanted the total to be eleven since it would be a truly original calendar -- no one else had a 11-day week. Hence I invented the Eleven Calendar.
Of course, my solution is still not a perfect solution. For example, I added the midweek rest day in order to avoid having six straight school days. But would that result in the day before the rest day becoming a second Friday (that is, with as many teacher absences as a Friday)? If so, then that would defeat the purpose of having six-day weeks. (The answer might be intermediate -- it could be that there are fewer absences on the midweek "Friday" than on the real "Friday," yet more than the other days of the week -- enough to outweigh the advantage of having 1/6 of all school days being true "Fridays" instead of 1/5.)
Then again, there's no way to experiment to see whether 11-day weeks might work, since I can't change the length of the week to 11 days just to find out.
If 11 days per week isn't optimal, perhaps we might be able to tweak it a little. I notice that there are a number of new 10-day calendars at the Calendar Wiki website:
https://calendars.wikia.org/wiki/Alternative_and_Proposed_Calendars
Maybe ten days will work better than eleven. The question is, do we eliminate a school day, the midweek rest day, or a weekend day to get to ten days? Again, which week length will minimize the total and peek absences?
The Gaia Calendar, Revisited
Last year for my Calendar Reform post, I linked to several lunisolar calendars and mentioned the Gaia Calendar as a possible calendar. It had an interesting but complicated Leap Month rule -- and I made several suggestions to simplify the Leap Month rule, based on another calendar that I had read about (the Meyer-Palmer Solilunar Calendar).
Well, the inventor of the calendar has taken my suggestions to heart. Here is a link to a new version of his calendar:
https://www.peristanom.org/p/calendar.html
This marks the second time that I've helped out a Calendar Reformer. (The first time was for the Andrew Usher Leap Week Calendar.) In both cases, my contribution was to simply the Leap Unit (that is, Leap Week or Leap Month) rules. My real baby is the Eleven Calendar.
Conclusion
And that is my goal for my next post, to be posted tomorrow. I will continue to develop the Eleven Calendar by adding suggestions for day names, month names, and what the 11-day week looks like.
I wish you many condolences for your recent loss, Phuong Nguyen.
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