>Free periods spent in the teachers' lounge don't lend themselves very well to meeting with students. Do your teachers in your public schools have to remain in a classroom during free periods?

I was teaching five years, and there's no way I could leave the classroom for more than ten seconds - and even then I'd be just at the door dealing with some problem. Otherwise, all hell would break loose :).

OK, I was teaching in a vo-tech school with the worst kids you could imagine, those who got their minimal passing grades from the 8th grade so they'd be passed to the next unfortunate institution, but then when I was a student in the high school, we were on the other end of the spectrum. It happened only occasionally that the professor would have to leave the classrom, and we didn't create too much trouble. For a while we did have a lot of empty classes, i.e. the mathematician who was scheduling went to be a programmer (and later my boss :), and a chemist took up the task - and we lived in a nice chaos for about a month. We'd just sneak out in groups of two or three - going to buy chewing gum, newspaper or whatever - and within ten minutes we'd all end up in the same bar :).