[timthorn]

It's worth sanity checking statistics - 340000 hours is equal to nearly 39 years, which seems a bit on the high side for a single school in a single year...

[michael_dorfman]

Exactly. Attendence checking doesn't take 5 minutes per student per class, yet that's what's being claimed by the math....

[kyteland]

If we can measure time spent productively in man-months then I say we can measure time wasted by the same metric.

[olefoo]

Actually if taking attendance takes 5 minutes of class time (which it easily can with a class size of 30), then all students are blocked from being taught while the teacher is busy so it does make sense to count that as (n+1) * 5 minutes where n is the number of students.

Fingerprint scanners for attendance would both speed up and parallelize this operation.

[cma]

What could possibly go wrong with implementing a complicated biometric fingerprint scanner based system for our schools?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1221068

[olefoo]

Well card swipes are obviously unworkable. You could maybe link it to student's mobile phones...

But the real solution is to have decent schools with classes small enough that the teacher doesn't have to take roll call because they know everyone.

[three14]

The claim seems to be that if I waste an hour of my time and an hour of yours, then that's two hours down the drain. I agree with it. (Although it seems to be missing * 5 days in a week.)