One thing I’ve had to deal with a lot more than I expected on Outschool is parents signing up for classes in the wrong time zones. I do most of my classes in the evenings, which corresponds to the period between about midnight and 6am in American time zones. I also do a few classes in the mornings, which are good for American time zones, as they correspond to late afternoon or early evening over there.
So my morning classes are mostly enrolled with American students (with a couple in Canada and currently one in Colombia). The evening classes are good for East Asian time zones (corresponding to afternoon or early evening there) or Europe (mid-morning there), but obviously terrible for America.
However, many times I’ve had parents in the USA enrol students into my evening classes. I keep having to communicate with them and point out that they’ve enrolled their kid in a class that begins at 2am or 3am in their time zone, explaining that I’m in Australia and so most of my classes are in the middle of the night for them. The usual response is that they just assumed it was 2 or 3pm. Outschool does time zone calculations and displays quite clearly when classes start in the parents’ local time (they have to set their time zone when opening an account). I have to assume that either they’re not paying attention to the obvious am/pm indicator, or that they are seeing the “am” and then assuming it must be wrong and must actually be pm.
As I said, I’ve had to deal with several cases of this, but I felt compelled to write about it today because I had one last week, and then this morning I had someone else (in the Arizona time zone) enrol their kid in a class with a suitable time (4pm), but then write to me, having changed their mind, and request a transfer into a class beginning at midnight.
This is a good example of a situation where using a 24-hour clock would be immensely useful, to avoid people making the 12-hour mistake. (I myself was guilty of this once many years ago, showing up at San Francisco Airport for a flight home 12 hours early. Thankfully it wasn’t 12 hours late!)
In other activity today, I did a run, for the first time since tripping and injuring myself on Sunday. I was aiming for 5k, but stopped at the halfway mark as I was feeling a bit sore and didn’t want to cause any additional issues.
I also worked on Darths & Droids a bit, starting to get a buffer ahead for after I get back from my Europe trip. I looked up the weather in Berlin, and it looks like being 32°C on Monday, when my meetings start. And my immediate thought was how lovely that will be compared to the cold weather we’re having here at the moment.