Revising Max’s School Schedule
While I’m a big fan of Life is Strange, I fully admit that there are some significant flaws in the game. One of these issues lies with Max’s school schedule which, honestly, reads more like a college schedule than high school. First, they have Max start school at 10 in the morning which everyone who has gone through the American school system can tell you, we wish school started that late.
Seriously, a lot of high schoolers would be far better adjusted if school started a couple hours later and they could sleep in. Oh, and we never got an hour for lunch. My school gave us 22 minutes - in fact, lunches were staggered between three lunch periods and you had five minutes to get to the cafeteria and 22 minutes to stand in line, get your food, and then eat. If your previous class was all the way on the other side of the school, you were standing in line for 15 minutes and then wolfing down lousy food over a couple of minutes - a grand preparation for how businesses treat their employees in fact.
Similarly, her classes don’t make any sense. We’ll ignore for now that Blackwell was too cheap to spring for a substitute teacher (and given substitutes were paid $70 a day back when I was a substitute teacher a couple decades ago, that is still pretty stingy!) or even have the principal or vice principal watch over class, and instead look at how she apparently only had two hours of history a week, two hours of Algebra, and one hour of physical education. That’s actually against the law if I’m remembering correctly, though they may have changed requirements from waaaay back when I went to high school and poufy hair was what was in. (Ah, the 80s. What a horror show.)
So I decided it’s time for Max to have a realistic school schedule, based on what is required by laws and honestly even private schools that cost a lot of money would be having kids remain in class for a lot longer. So… that late start to the day? It’s out. School starts at 8 and runs until 4. And to be honest? That’s lenient as many places start at 7:30. Next? Lunches are 25 minutes long - which is a bit more than a number of schools offer, even if it’s less than half of Blackwell’s overly generous system. And third? Nine periods each running 45 minutes with five minutes between each class, and a 5 minute homeroom (the first class of the day).
Next, I changed Max’s workload. It honestly made little sense for Max to have three hours of English (before the teacher went AWOL, that is) and two hours of World History a week. Instead, each of the core classes (English, Social Studies, Math, and Science) would run all week. Physical Education is now twice a week along with a Health class. The end result (not including the initial five minute Homeroom scheduling from 8:00 to 8:05) looks like this:
This is a far more realistic schedule (and anyone crafting fanfiction for Life is Strange is more than welcome to use this new schedule), and it’s easy to craft other character schedules to integrate with this one - for instance, Warren would be sharing the Chemistry class and lab with Max, and perhaps The Art of Science. Kate would also take Music Lab with Max and possibly Life Drawing. And on down the line.
Anyway, I hope you all enjoy this small exercise in inserting a little sanity into the Blackhell academic situation. ;)
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