If this is going to be a real yearbook, I suppose I'd better write a bit about where the places are in the school. As if there was a school...
This is a natural starting place, as time seems to have started here. The teachers in this area are among some of the most backward looking people around. What kind of teacher actually threatens you with physical harm nowadays? Eh? They also seem to be just starting their mental careers, as well. Immune to new ideas and suggestions, they sit around for months (often during the final week of major coursework deadline) thinking up weird and wonderful new organisation schemes that will increase productivity in the workshop. One of the simplest ideas (and, paradoxically, one of the worst) they've come up with is the idea of having colour coded cupboards, so that each class only uses one cupboard in their lesson. This is probably to keep track of who's got all the tools when they invariably go missing - in fact, they probably vowed never to lose another chisel, and for it to then turn up, wedged in somebody's back. No. The really bad thing about this idea is that, while there's nothing wrong with letting a class only use tools from the red cupboard, it doesn't help if the red cupboard only contains hammers. This results in whole classes producing ridiculously generic devices and products - the people from the green cupboard, which contains only screws and a countersink, will produce different things to people using the blue cupboard which contains only clamps, who will in turn produce different things to the people back at the red cupboard. Respectively, they'll make stuff that is screwed, bent and battered.
They are also pretty damn lazy over in the CDT faculty - they're the only ones who spend their free time creating wedges of pre-signed detentions to give out to whoever might be passing by and coughing at the same time. This doesn't help, as they're the only ones who smoke. And smoke they do.
In all fairness, they're not too bad - they're humans, after all. But then again, the humans they appear to have modelled themselves on were probably the kind of people who contemplated suicide when the cane was banned.
These are some of the smartest people in the whole school - the only faculty that's managed to scrape together the funds required to hire a doctor. I'm not sure what he's a doctor of, but he must be pretty smart, because he certainly didn't spend his time at university doing any work...
They have to be smart, otherwise they don't get through the door. And I mean that quite literally - the science faculty door looks as if they sliced it out of Fort Knox and planted it in the wall here at KHS. What could possibly go on behind this door? The few fleeting glimpses we've had so far have either been so fleeting that we blinked and missed them, or were obscured by a teacher demanding to know what we were staring at behind him.
This obsession with doors continues, as they have purchased a door with a radioactive symbol on it to stick some secret things behind. One of them might be radioactive, but safety regulations mean it's about as radioactive as the average cafeteria bun. So we'd better be careful.
Finally, proof of the Door Theorem was when Adam pulled the door off Lab6 (perhaps he was humming too much, or something) and it was replaced within a day. This means they must have a ready supply of doors to stick wherever they see fit. Of course, I could be reading too much into this, but I wouldn't be the first one to do that, now, would I?...
No. I wouldn't.
These people virtually live in the portakabin English Block, perched between the main body of the school, and the long arm of the science corridor (A bit like the spaceship in Event Horizon, but without the evil. And the spaceship.). Quite where they were before this place was built I don't know. Perhaps they didn't teach English back then? Anyway. The main structure of the English block is made from some kind of oversized lego piece, with holes inside called rooms. The outside is covered in white sandpaper, and the inner walls are made from Jacob's water biscuits. If anybody makes a sound - and I mean anybody - whether it is a glass shop exploding upstairs, or a couple of atoms jiggling around in a corner, you can hear it from wherever you are. Everything is audible. Every teacher's voice. Every person walking. Every End Of Lesson Rumble. And the doors are made from voles. It is the only way I can account for the intense screeching made whenever you touch them.
As for the people, they're mostly hippies, or part time staff. The English Faculty contains the best teacher in the school, and the most neutral one. They're a mixed bunch, but at least there are no teachers that are so bad they couldn't teach their way out of a room.
Most faculties indulge in a little pinning up of inspiring material around their areas, but none does it so prolifically as the Maths area. Everywhere you go, there is something on the wall trying to get you interested in a Greek Mathematician or trying to make your eyes explode in confusion as you try to work out how many sides that fork has.
The faculty room door is one of those that has been covered in paper. Many people think this is to stop you seeing in, but in fact, it is to stop the teachers seeing out. The probability of something interesting happening inside the faculty room is so low that before the paper was put up, maths teachers would waste away days of their 'valuable' time looking through the door, hoping something amusing would come along.
There is a question that goes a bit like this: with all those computers and scientific equipment, not to mention the glut of hammers and things in the CDT faculty, how are the school finding the money to fund the PE faculty? The answer is of course, that they aren't. The school would never fund something as asinine and poorly organised as this. No. The money is coming from other sources, and there is a theory about where it's coming from that goes a bit like this: you know you always take your watch off for PE (because they tell you to, dammit) and stuff it in your bag because you don't trust their filthy swindling rugby ridden hands with your goods? Well there are people who actually give up their valuables and put it in their collection plate which is then stored away in the PE cupboard. Now for the bit you didn't know...
During PE, they make you do disorientation exercises so you lose your bearings on where the teacher is, or indeed if there is one there. The job has become considerably easier in recent years, as few kids know what a real PE teacher looks like. Most of those imposters you have for PE lessons just sit by the side and watch you play a few games, occasionly organising teams and defusing minor arms build-ups. The real PE teachers are highly skilled forgery artists, who spend their time analysing your valuables and copying them. You receive the copy and they keep the original, and flog it in posh foreign shops. If you realise that twenty kids give them watches and other stuff every lesson, each item worth upwards of £30, you can imagine how tidy a profit they make, even after purchasing the PE 'equipment'. I'm telling you, The Consortium are evil.
Tidied away, after the untidy dismissal of Herr Blackett, in a remote corner of the school, past the PE Faculty, is the music faculty. The two of them have the whole building to themselves and are free to throw out anybody they please, whether they're in a lesson or not. Regular teachers never visit the music faculty, as the rails don't go there, and there's nothing worth going there for anyway. The windows are barred up by thick steel, erm... bars. This is presumably to stop people breaking in and passing expensive (but wretchedly old) equipment out. But wait! Why would a criminal want to enter and exit through the window when they could easily walk in through the unlocked door? Honestly, security is so lax in this place that the toilets are overflowing. When the people from Wise Up came to talk to us about interesting issues, they ignored our "Hey! The Security in this school is so poor I could steal the walls from around the burglar sensors!" argument, prefering instead to go bankrupt and stop making programs. Perhaps.
Unprofessional whinging and corrupt favouristic profiteering aside, they're really quite nice people. Curry soup, hippy clothes and "nice" won't save them, though, as at the end of the day, it's the teaching ability that counts. In this case, for nothing.
Is a small, dull office, which is a subsidiary of...
The notice on the door says "Do NOT under any circumstances knock before 1.55pm." The thing is, if we are out of our tutor rooms after 1.55pm, we officially get a detention. While this is not practically true or even possible, it is technically correct - another example of how rules will backfire on you when you make them up on the spot, leaving out 6 pages. For example. Anyway, this therefore means we must knock on the door at EXACTLY 1.55pm, otherwise we'll break one of their rules. This is physically impossible, which leaves us no option but to not see them at all. So much for their promises of "If you have a problem, come and see me! My door is always open!" and later reprimands of "Why didn't you come and see me? My door was always open!"
That was another example of the Being Exact/Time Reference joke which is used elsewhere in the guide. I mean, erm... the yearbook.
The school is very large, I'm sure you all know, but like a bad adventure game, it's size is artificially inflated by the odd placement of rooms, lessons and corridor blocks. These are the official corridor blocks, though. Nobody is allowed to go through the staff corridor, forcing you to go all the way around, through the two most crowded corridors in the whole school, adding to the panic. At lunchtime, you aren't allowed to go down the arterial science corridor, forcing you to simply go outside and around the long way.
Also, PE lessons always end five minutes too late. It takes time to get changed, don't they know? This means that if you have a lesson on the other side of the school after PE, you WILL be late, whether you want to or not. The following equation (and it doesn't matter if it's wrong because I showed my working, or so I'm lead to believe...) demonstrates the problem of huge distances within KHS.
Economics - 12
Electronics - C8
Maths - 14
Geography - 11
English - 48
This is a fairly typical day. It takes about 5 minutes to get from my locker to my tutor room, and if I walk at about 0.5m/s (the medium traffic density speed), it must be about 150m to my tutor room, which was so conveniently moved to the English block at the start of year 11. From there it is 100m to economics, 200m to electronics, 200m back to my locker for break, and 150m to Maths. At this point, I realise that my Geography room is within sight of my Maths room, on the other side of a small corridor room filled with computers (11a). We are, however, not allowed through here, so my journey is 100m instead of 5m. For lunch, I walk around 300m, back to tutor (150m) and off to English, which thankfully, is right across the corridor from tutor. That adds up to 1355m, or 1.355km. We'll round that up to 1.5km to account for all the little traipses we get sent on by bored members of staff.
A kilometer and a half. I'm not sure what that means, but I'm complaining anyway.