[Tutor] How to effectively use a Student class with SQLite [Was Re: How to design object interactions with an SQLite db?]

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Thu, 13 Aug 2015 23:42:33 -0500, boB Stepp writes:
>Many of my wife's students do have their own email accounts, but,
>alas, not all of them.  I have not totally thought this through yet,
>but the student data will include their parents' names and some of
>their data.  But it will be my luck that two students will have the
>same name, John Allan Smith, with their dads having the same name!
>But I guess I can list both parents' names.  Surely that would enable
>the user to reliably pick the correct student?
>
>As an aside, when discussing my wife's user requirements for this
>project, I found out that some of her students have, shall we say, a
>variety of parents:  birth parents, multiple step-parents, parents who
>are not allowed to have contact with their children, legal guardians
>who are not parents, etc.  Ay, yi, yi!
>
>
>-- 
>boB

You've found the 'variety of parents' problem.  Listing the parents'
names will only let your wife know she has the correct student if she
habitually thinks of the parent names when she thinks of the student.
I suspect her internal labelling is more likely to be along the lines
of 'the short one', 'the one who plays the cello', 'the one who used
to have difficulty reading' and 'the one whose water-pistol I
confiscated in the first week of class'.

So you may be better off letting the teacher specify some tags she can use
and apply to any student, which can be of use when you need to
tell one student from another, and the name just isn't doing it for you.
(Perhaps because you have several students with that name, but also because
this is a student you taught many years ago.  The name is vaguely
familiar but the details have blurred over time.  "Water-Pistol" will
evoke better memories than parents' name in this case, as if you can
barely remember the child you most likely have lost the parents altogether.)

Laura