The Locker Placement Theory

Copyright (C) 1999, Sandra B. Fan

Made possible in part by a grant from the Janet & Sylvie Foundation for the Study of Sandra's Nutball Ideas (In the senior wills. Thanks, you guys.)

Introduction

Over the course of my years in many different schools across the United States, I have discovered a universal principle linking the placement of one's locker in relation to other lockers and to one's previous lockers to one's academic grades. How high up your locker is determines how well you will do in school. This theory has two parts. First part pertains only to the locker owner, from here on referred to as the Subject. The second part is in relation to the Subject's locker placement relative to the locker placement of those around him. Unfortunately, I have been unable to uncover the direction of causation, so just because I've discovered this theory, doesn't mean that if you go complain to your counselor for a better-placed locker, you will necessarily get better grades. It could be the grades that caused you to get that locker spot, or the locker spot that caused you to get the grades.

Part I

Say the Subject attends a school with lockers that are placed in four rows. Freshman year, the Subject uses a locker on the bottom row. While the chances of his getting bad grades are slightly higher than if he had one on an upper row, generally, it doesn't matter. He gets grade K, let's say. The next year, he gets a locker on the row third from the top, that is, one row up from freshman year. His grades will improve. It doesn't matter what grade K was, his grades this year will be better than K. If he gets a locker that is all the way on the top, his grades rise in proportion. If he retains the same locker row sophomore year as senior year, however, his grades will remain the same, and will not go lower.

Now let's say the Subject had a locker on the top row the year after that, that is, junior year. His grades will be higher than Freshman year, but if, Senior year, he takes a locker on the second, third, or last from the top row, his grades will suffer accordingly.

This theory works not according to how many rows are below you, but how many are above you. Junior year at St. Andrew's Priory found me with a locker with only one person above it. Say my average GPA that year was W. When I went to Iolani, the lockers had more rows, and I had a row higher up from the bottom than I did at the Priory. However, at Iolani, I had a locker with two people's lockers above me, and thus, even though technically, I am higher up, my GPA for that year was below W because more students occupied the lockers above mine.

Part II

Say the Subject has two friends, X and Y. X has a locker on a row higher than Subject. This will mean that X will receive better academic grades than Subject. Now let's say X has the top row, Y has the second from the top row, and Subject has the third from the top row. This will mean that X receives the highest academic grades, then Y, and lowest of the three will be Subject.

Case in point: senior year at Iolani. Tanner Fahl and Albert Ching had the two lockers exactly above mine. Needless to say, I did crappier than they, and now they're off at Harvard, and I'm at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (Hawaii? They have universities in Hawaii? I thought they just had luaus and danced hula in grass skirts all day. Uh, I'm not bitter or anything, I have actually come to really love UH.) However, consecutive locker placement and the consecutive placement of students on a ordering of high-to-low GPAs does NOT have a relation. In other words, even though Tanner and Albie's lockers were directly above mine, there were still a heck of a lot of folk in between us, in terms of GPA. We're just dealing with the general relation, in other words, their lockers were higher, they had better GPAs, and NOT they had lockers right above mine, thus I come immediately after them in GPA.

Conclusion

Thus, one's relative locker placement will show one's grades relative to the grades of the previous year, and of other students. This theory DOES NOT measure the effort one exerts into school work one particular year, nor actual knowledge gained that year. It only measures one's concrete academic grade, the one that is placed on your report card. Grades, aren't everything, and neither are locker placements. I hope to have only documented an interesting insight into the correlation between the two, and I hope also that someone in the future will be able to put my findings to good use in bettering the general welfare of students everywhere.