Oh, trips down memory lane, and about schools, yay, I love those. Let's see.
High school, or at least the sort-of equivalent that I signed up for (grades 8 to 13, 5 year course), had 50 minute teaching units. Five minute breaks between each unit, with a a 50 minute break (for lunch) after four or five classes. Most of the days started at 08:15 and ended 16:25. We had some school days ending at 17:20, and some started at 07:20. With my commute times being what they were, I left home at 06:35 (5:35 at the insane days that started earlier than normal) and was at home ~18:15 at the earliest, shortly before 20:00 at the worst. Homework and assignments usually took another hour, longer on days with accounting and maths, as those had teachers who delighted in giving out a lot of assignments. Right, in between we were supposed to study too, I guess. During 2nd and 4th grades we had to apply for a summer internship. Students were not allowed to proceed to the next grade without them.
The busiest schedule we had in 11th grade, clocking in at 14 or 15 separate classes, including "voluntary" extracurricular activities. Least busy was the final grade with 8 classes, but we had a year long project for the finals and a paper* to write. By least busy I mean we "only" had 30 units per week in the final grade, as opposed to 36 + ECs. Projects were picked or assigned from a pool of projects submitted by companies, government agencies and NGOs. Most students wanted company projects because they were an easy way to find a job (and the companies had free talent to check out for a year) - plenty of us who had a company project actually worked part time for those companies during the final year, so the ones from the agencies and NGOs ended up being assigned. My group got their project from the school board: digitising administrative processes at schools. Pretty neat topic that no one else took seriously, although I suppose the idea came a bit too early (talking late 1990ies/early 00s here).
For the paper we were provided a massive set of anonymized data from our school: students' grades in each class and the amount of classes they missed each year. The basic idea was pretty simple, we were to find a correlation between the grades and missed classes. It seems logical enough, I suppose, students who miss a lot of classes should generally have worse grades than those who don't, except try as we might, we could not find any meaningful correlation, it was near zero. One of our teachers was so baffled by the results that she went over our calculations. Three times, in as many weeks.
The only thing we could show was that there were certain classes and teachers where lower attendence in genereal tended to lead to worse grades, but that is logical, we had classes where the grade directly depended on attendence, like PE, or teachers that factored attendence into their grades. Needless to say, the presentation of our results did not go over too well. The obvious problem is the small sample size, and that one needed to pass an SAT to even get into the school in the first place, and even then, the dropout rate in the first year is above 50%, and of everyone who started the same year as I did, less than 15% actually graduated. Once past the first grade you're left with students easily capable of making up any missed time, and missing classes is not the leading cause of the high dropout rate in the first year.
*Not to scientific writing standards, but it did include research pertaining (at least superficially) to the project for the final exams.
Im dichten Fichtendickicht sind dicke Fichten wichtig. *scnr*