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Time To Rethink the School Desk?
theodp writes "As part of its reimagine the 21st-century classroom project, Slate asks: Is the best way to fix the American classroom to improve the furniture? While adults park their butts in $700 Aeron chairs, kids still sprawl and slump and fidget and dangle their way through the day in school furniture designed to meet or beat a $40 price point. 'We've seen in adults that if you put them in the right chair, their performance increases,' says Harvard's Jack Dennerlein. 'Is the same true for children? I can't see why not.' For school districts with deep pockets, there are choices — a tricked-out Node chair from IDEO and Steelcase can be had for $599."
Me thinks that someone wants to sell furniture.
. .
> if you put them in the right chair, their performance increases
As far as ROI goes, I think a better investment might be teachers, books, and paper.
Just sayin'
Has the author ever looked at the typical school desk? Kids destroy these things--carve them up, knock them over, etc. Durability is worth something, but more importantly, this cheap furniture is cheap to replace. Lord knows it won't make it through more than a couple school seasons without taking a terrible beating. Expensive and comfortable stuff isn't likely to last very long, and is too costly to replace when the kids finally kill it.
'We've seen in adults that if you put them in the right chair, their performance increases,'
The 'right' chair is my desk chair at home. My productivity is always better when I'm working from home rather than being on-site at a client.
School systems with deep pockets eh? /sarcasm I guess that is true. You know, I've always just kept spending more and more all my life. It's a great way to survive, look cool, and generally act as a good little consumer.
Am I the only one that sees the idea behind this as just insanity?
Have you seen what kids are capable of doing to furniture?
It is hard enough to replace a $40 chair, and for $500 I can replace a dozen or so of the "elite" chairs. No thanks. It is simply amazing how easy it is to spend money, when it isn't yours.
And working in classrooms all day, I can tell you the chairs are the least of the distractions in the classroom.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Actually when I was in school, I never found the seats to be a problem.
What I _did_ find to be an annoyance was being stuck in them for hours at a time. This was particularily bad in the earlier grades where you tended to stay in the same room.
Even today I have no problem working in the most uncomfortable chair as long as I can get up every half hour or so and stretch my legs.. even if it is just a quick walk around the building.
I think this should some how be adopted in schools. I don't know how the logistics would work as I remember just getting everyone back after recess was a chore.. but I think getting away from the desk, even temporarily, is going to do way more than some new fangled "node chair".
As a side thought: most uncomfortable chairs I find are the ones who either don't have a locking back, or have a back that can't quite be adjusted to the right angle (that is, you have a choice of 90 degree perfect right angle, or fully reclined).
No.
Next question?
Caveat Utilitor
Moldy cardboard? Wow, you were pampered! We had to use each other as furniture, even though we weren't allowed to eat on weekdays and had to walk naked through five feet of snow for three miles, uphill in both directions. And we used each other as paper too... scratching our notes onto each others' backs with out dirty, cracked fingernails.
You had furniture in your school? We had to make do with moldy cardboard boxes for desks and sharp piles of rusting scrap metal for chairs, and we had to collect the scrap metal ourselves from train yards and storm drains.
We had to use cleverly arranged FedEx boxes Sure, we sold out, but we all got free mouse pads!
make them all stand at tables and do their work. Nothing brings focus to a task like having to stand to do it.
When the summary said "For school districts with deep pockets..." it really meant "For school districts that are able to reach deeply into the pockets of the local property owners..."
You're right, it is.
When I was in elementary school, we had these. We started out with openable desks that you could put your stuff in, you could get comfortable, arrange your chair however you wanted. It was nice, there was no left or right handed distinction. They were always right in front of you.
As I moved through the grades, my left-handed self was forced to use right-handed desks, which caused cramps and gave me a 'hunch.' There was no storage on or under the desk. There was no getting comfortable. Just 3 hour stretches of nothing but discomfort. If you were tall or fat, you'd be uncomfortable all day long.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Hah. Most of my career my butt has been parked in whatever aging POS I could scrounge that wouldn't fall apart.
Insofar as I do have a nice new chair now (my first), may I observe that those who DO have $700 Aeron chairs do so because they are creating wealth, not just absorbing material. (Those unclear on rules of logic are reminded that the last sentence does not mean those who do not have an expensive chair are not creating wealth.) One EARNS comfort as a matter of surplus, it is not "deserved" by simple existence and presence. The expensive chair sat upon is a consequence of productivity, not a primary means thereto.
The "to improve education, throw more money at it" crowd fails to realize that by far the biggest factor in education is the student's own willingness to learn. If they don't want to be there, students will squirm just as much in an expensive chair as a cheap one, and get just as little out of the experience.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I paid for part of my degree by working as a custodian in a school district near my home in New Jersey. I'm not quite sure what their newer desks are made of, but it's certainly not Bakelite - it doesn't have the characteristic smell.
The problem with putting even low-to-moderately nice-ish things in a school is two-fold:
First, kids from middle school and up (even kids in a decently well to do area) seem to love destroying stuff. There's two basic types of desks in this district, the kind with a particle board desktop with some kind of 'tough' plastic outer coating, and the kind with a solid hard/resilient plastic desktop. The main mode of failure of the first kind is some wise-ass will start to use a mechanical pencil or similar to start etching something asinine into the top of the desk. Then someone will start to pull at the scar and will eventually peel back and rip off the whole outer plastic coating. With the second kind, it's apparently far more entertaining to just break off the whole top of the desk since it's brittle and will fracture nicely.
Second is that every summer, the whole school gets cleaned with some rather interesting commercial cleaners. In order to get off all the pencil/pen/marker marks, there's an even harsher cleaner that's used. So if you try to use some kind of fabric or softer material, they simply won't get cleaned. It's hard enough to get a school full of hard surfaces cleaned in a summer without having to clean fabric furniture and worrying about mold/mildew/stains/etc. With parents being what they are, they won't stand for their little precious snowflakes having to park their asses on dirty furniture - so that's out.
Think about it like this... why do you suppose that there's no nice stuff available in public parks? Some people (not everyone, but enough to be a problem) just like breaking other people's stuff. It's not theirs, why should they worry? Take what you see in just about any publicly available restroom and now apply that to furniture. It's a problem of attitude and personal responsibility.
I was watching a National Geographic show the other day about some public schools in Pakistan where they don't have desks, chairs, or even a freaking building. Kids sit on their butts in a brickyard with no shelter, and the school has a single blackboard.
You know, granted, I've never been a teacher in a public school, but when I was a military instructor I always found that teaching outdoors worked better than anything else. I had a classroom with computers and a projector and powerpoint slides coming out of my ass, but just taking them outside seemed to get much better focus from the students, and their marks went up accordingly.
Don't get me wrong - I love technology, and sometimes you certainly DO need a high-tech environment to teach certain subjects. But maybe we've gone a bit overboard. Why in the world should geography be taught indoors? Or English, for that matter? I'm fairly certain that Shakespeare didn't come up with his ideas by spending 8 hours a day sitting in a room, staring at a blackboard or a screen, so why should his works be studied in that environment?