Do you ever think about how many things are arranged in alphabetic order? In many instances, this arrangement keeps things orderly and makes them easy to find, but does alphabetic order ever seem unfair to you when your turn in line is determined by the first letter of your last name? I’ll guess that if your last name begins with a letter in the first part of the alphabet, your answer is “no.” My last name began closer to the end of the alphabet, so my answer is “yes.”

I attended a small, rural, two-room elementary school. Depending on the year, there were 50-60 students in eight grades, with grades 1-4 in one room and grades 5-8 in the other. Our school had two small libraries consisting of three shelves that stretched across the back of each classroom. The libraries included a full set of encyclopedias and several dictionaries, so that diminished the space available for recreational reading materials during one’s four years in that classroom. Because this was true of so many schools in our largely rural county, the county provided a “traveling library.” The county school superintendent and his/her assistant made the rounds of all the rural schools every two weeks to exchange packing boxes filled with about 30 books. In a round-robin pattern, each classroom in each school exchanged its current box of books for a box with a different selection of books that came from a different school.

I have always loved to read and I finish books quickly, so I was always impatient and eager for the traveling library to bring a new box of books to our school. Unfortunately for me, my teacher believed that the fairest way to distribute the new books while keeping order in the classroom was to allow a few students at a time to make their one-book selection. This was done in alphabetic order, always beginning with the “A’s.” I lived in an area of Dutchmen, many of whose names began with De-capital letter-remainder of last name, such as DeBlaey, DeMaster, etc., and my last name began with “S.” Those early-alpha kids always had the first pick of the traveling library books and I was always in the last group to make a selection. The traveling library rules said that when you finished reading the book you selected, you put it back into the box and then had the option to choose a different book from the box. The early-alpha kids frequently failed to finish their selected books in the two-week exchange period, so their selections didn’t make it back to the box until the exchange day, and I rarely had a chance to read everything I wanted to read.

Alphabetically, things changed for me when I enrolled in a large university (35,000 students). Class enrollment was open for several days each semester, and was available in alphabetic order. Naturally, those who were in the first alphabetic group were nearly always able to enroll in whichever course/day/time they chose while those in the last group usually had to make some course/day/time adjustments. BUT, the alphabetic groups changed order each semester. I don’t remember the exact groupings, but if, for example, A-G had first choice this semester, they moved to the #3 spot the following semester; group H-P moved to #1; and Q-Z moved to #2. In this way, once every three semesters, everyone had a chance to be first, second, or third in course selection. What could be more fair while still maintaining order and a manageable number of students enrolling at a given time? There may be other entities that do this, but I’ve never encountered or heard of them, so this was a happy revelation to me as a college freshman, and it’s certainly more fair than always giving the “A’s” first choice and the “Z’s” last choice.