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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.
My school district just declared that their budget is going to increase by 40% over the next 4 years, to over $180 million! Why not throw some of these in there too?? They already announced those numbers so they can let us know that unless we pass gargantuan levies over the next three years, they'll be $70 million in the hole by then - why not throw in some incredibly expensive chairs, too?
If I had a nickel for every time I had a nickel, I'd be richcursive!
'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).
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. But try telling that to kids these days, they won't believe you!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Funny that I saw this article earlier today.
"CHILDREN have grown too big for their school chairs, a survey of 750 schools revealed.
Teachers said "desk and chair sizes were often inappropriate".
It is understood the NSW Education Department has been taking orders for custom-sized chairs.
Paediatric dietician Susie Burrell said children who were overweight often didn't carry obvious fat but instead looked older than their age."
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/school-children-are-now-becoming-too-fat-to-fit-in-class-chairs/story-e6frf7l6-1225944436838
So you tell the parents, "Your kids will be smarter if you use product X." Parents in the hyper competitive nature of schools today will do whatever it takes to make sure their child gets the $500 aeron chair. The parents will scrambled to pump as much money as they can into making sure their kid gets the advantage.
What do you think Apple is doing trying to get iPads into every classroom? Because Apple makes more money off of selling 10million iPads every year to schools, then it does when they buy books/pencils/paper.
Think of the children and your wallet will open up.
My wife teaches 2nd grade and most of her students prefer to stand while they work. So she lets them stand. The tables in the class room are adjusted to be comfortable while standing (thanks to her nerd husband who always carries tools) and the kids love it.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
No.
Next question?
Caveat Utilitor
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?
For a classroom, here's things we can't have:
Wheels that enable the desk to slide --- Two words: Bumper Cars
Swivel seats --- Because it's just an excuse to fidget
****Better yet... NO MOVING PARTS****
Required specialist maintenance --- Because it won't be provided
Real, non-particle board wood --- It's too expensive and warps.
Any plastic aside from the seat and the chair back --- They're too easily carved, melted, bent, broken, etc.
Arms/Wings --- Because they're always too sharp and not good for fat kids
The chair presented in the article is a triumph of design, but it won't work for anyone with any internal child. Yes, that means college students down to kindergartners. It's a Ferrari of desks when schools (ALL schools) look for steel-block engine trucks that require little maintenance beyond a wash and an oil from time to time.
They should have designed around the restrictions of the user instead of trying to redefine the user with design.
Answer: Because there is more to education than the measures used to tell us that Japan and England keep kicking our butts. The reality is that there is education for education's sake and there is education for the real world. And Japan and England are failing miserably at the latter.
Real answer: Because Nobel prizes are given for past achievements and the median age of laureates is very high (over 60 I believe and rising). In other words you can have the shittiest K-12 education system in the world but if 50 years ago you had a monopoly on higher education (like say if the rest of the world was still rebuilding from having most of it's cities razed to the ground) than you'll still be getting a lot of nobel prizes.
Follow the link to List of Nobel Laureates, and look at the individuals. Note how many of those "American" Nobel prize winners were of foreign nationality and moved to the US as adults.
What we have is money.
My kid's class has a half dozen of those big exercise balls. For the more fidgety kids, sitting on the ball at their desk allows them a little wiggle so they can let their minds do what they want. Nobody falls down, and not every kid benefits from the "ball-chair", but it helps certain kids a LOT.
Face it: most office chairs allow at least a rotation axis. If your desk chair didn't rotate a little you'd spend a LOT of time fighting the chair. By allowing a little freedom of movement, you can work with the tool and not against it.
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.
Because there's ample evidence that spending more money creates better results. That's why children are 3 times more educated than they were back in the 1950s.
OK, maybe not these overpriced toys. But a rather large number of the chairs I was stuck with in primary and secondary school had a molded and textured plastic seat and back with large metal rivets holding the back and seat to a metal frame. Never mind the ordinary discomfort of such an apparatus. Consider what happens when cloth moves against plastic... you get a static charge. Guess where that discharges? Right through the metal rivets. So in dry weather, sitting in such a chair meant constantly getting shocked in the back, legs, and butt. Real conducive to learning, that.
Here is one incarnation of said torture device.
The teachers suck, the schools suck, the curriculum sucks, the textbooks suck, the culture sucks. QUICK SOMEONE FIX THE CHAIRS