Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Time To Rethink the School Desk?

Posted by timothy on from the time-to-rethink-school-generally dept.

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."

32 of 405 comments (clear)

  1. Hmmm by Master+Moose · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Me thinks that someone wants to sell furniture.

    --
    . . .gone when the morning comes
    1. Re:Hmmm by Romancer · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is BS, get the metalshop and woodshop to build and maintain the desks. They'll learn to build things to survive the worst and if they have to sit in them anyway they'll make them comfortable too. The higher schools can build for the lower where they don't have the facilities and give it to them at cost since they're learning, kinda like the hair stylist and cooking schools.

      --


      ) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
      ) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
    2. Re:Hmmm by TheWanderingHermit · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Definitely depressing. I used to teach full time, but before that, I subbed. I spent a week writing a script to send out (that later got me in touch with a Hollyweird agent, so it did its job) and after that week, went back to sub at one school I liked. That break of doing something I loved put me in a different frame -- when I drove up to that school, I started getting really depressed and realized a lot had to do with the building itself. We design offices so we like them. The same with homes. But schools are still, more often than not, dull and functional and uninteresting buildings. It's a wonder kids can stand them or teachers will put up with working in many of them.

      There's also a story in education reform where there were a few men shopping for desks and noticed they all had small surfaces and went to someone who sold furniture to schools. The described what they wanted and he said, "Oh, you won't find that. You want a desk where students can work and be creative and functional. These desks are designed solely for listening."

      Really a sad statement on the abuse we foster on our children in the name of education.

    3. Re:Hmmm by buback · · Score: 3, Insightful

      What metalshop/woodshop? The only thing schools spend money on now is football/sports.

    4. Re:Hmmm by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 3, Informative

      I take it you've never heard of apprenticeships? For humour's sake, here in Soviet Canada at the high school I went to, there was a for-credit cooking class that actually produced the specials that the cafeteria sold, and most of the regular cafeteria staff were also students.

      --
      Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
    5. Re:Hmmm by LurkerXXX · · Score: 3, Insightful

      We design offices so we like them.

      You and I have worked in *vastly* different offices.

  2. Return on Investment by flaming+error · · Score: 5, Insightful

    > 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'

    1. Re:Return on Investment by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Changing the start time has also been shown to increase scores dramatically. Best of all. It's "FREE". Instead of 7/8 - 3. Do 10-5.

      Don't most studies show kids get into the most amount of trouble (sex, drugs, rock and roll) after school before parents are home?

      Start them at 10. They'll sleep until class starts. Wake up, be awake in class and be home when their parents get home.

    2. Re:Return on Investment by phsource · · Score: 4, Insightful

      As a college student, I can testify that an investment in the chair can pay off. Sure, there's teachers and books to spend. However, chairs, chalkboards, smartboards, and other classroom amenities play a part too. The chairs attached to a small writing pad (like the one linked to) are just horrible for a lecture or class. You can fit no more than a small notebook on the surface: want to get out your other notebook, a handout, or your laptop, and take a look at both at the same time? Tough luck! Of course, we shouldn't treat students like royalty and indulge in $800 Aeron chairs, and investment in teachers would help. But we should give them a practical environment where they can sit comfortably, take notes, and make the classroom an effective learning _environment_. After all, that's why people study in their libraries, not their rooms.

    3. Re:Return on Investment by edmicman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Can we do that for corporate America, too?

    4. Re:Return on Investment by snowraver1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      As a former young person, I can say that if you bought nice chairs, they would not be nice for long.

      You know the saying "People with kids can't have nice things"? Well, it's true. Keep them in the wood/metal/plastic chairs. Anything with padding is a waste of money.

      --
      Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. This comment may not be copied in any way including, but not limited to caching.
    5. Re:Return on Investment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Australians do it that way, starting at 10 am, there was an article about half a year ago on mindhacks about the adolescent sleep behaviour, with a lot of useful details.

      For the furniture problem ... well, we're talking amercan students, so you should use steel, lots of it.

    6. Re:Return on Investment by Korin43 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So instead of getting into trouble in the afternoons, kids would get into trouble in the morning,

      Yeah, I remember waking up early all the time when I was in high school. Oh wait. No.. never.

      I think we should just make the school day to 9-5, and use the extra time to add back the art, music, exercise, etc. that's been cut to make more time for test prep

      Or even better, we could give kids free time so they can explore things they like rather than shoving things you like down their throats.

    7. Re:Return on Investment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      They don't get up in the morning... that's the point.

    8. Re:Return on Investment by dgatwood · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I assume you left out a word in that first sentence and meant to say "low enough" or "bad enough". And to a large extent, that's true. It's also true for most other industries. One of the biggest problems the U.S. has is its own success. On the one hand, you have communism where there's no incentive to do better because you don't get any more, so nothing gets done very well. On the other hand, you have pure capitalism, where the vast majority of people are slave labor to the people at the top, with only a few fields breaking the rules at any given time and providing a means to actually get ahead of the curve. So all the smart people flock to those fields, those fields achieve wonders, and nothing else gets done very well. What you really need is a system in which everyone in every field is rewarded equally for their achievements, which is, unfortunately, a hard system to design and sustain. For example, such a system precludes the existence of multi-million-dollar CEO salaries because nothing outside of the management field can possibly achieve similar levels. The problem with this, of course, is that somebody who does a wonderful job as a waitress can't feasibly be paid as much as somebody who does a wonderful job as a software engineer at a multi-million-dollar company because we can't afford to pay ten grand for a meal. And that's why economic systems are fundamentally inequitable by nature. Eventually, automation will render much of this moot, but in the short and medium term, it's a problem.

      In the medium term, though, our society is going to be really screwed if we continue to pay teachers the salaries we pay them. But before we can pay teachers more, we have to have money to pay them with. This means that we either have to lower the number of teachers (which is already too low in many districts), raise taxes, or cut spending somewhere else. That's the harsh reality. We've built up a system of government that taxes and spends (Democrats) or borrows and spends (Republicans) right up to the very edge of its means, without saving for tough times, without any long-term thinking about the eventual costs associated with its choices, focused solely on what the bottom line will look like around election day when it matters to them, and that's bad for many, many reasons. We have to start by tearing down that system, one large swath at a time, cutting deeply but judiciously into government spending, and frankly, the only way to do that is to spend money.

      Give proportional bonuses to manager-level personnel in the public sector for finding ways to cut costs without cutting services. Provide additional temporary jobs to aid in doing so, as needed. As soon as you implement such a system, you'll likely cut 20% out of your budget in the first year. Right now, the tendency at all levels of the government is to horde resources---to concentrate resources within each individual administrator's fiefdom, knowing that if they don't use it, they will lose it. And indeed, we see this in business, too---managers saying things like, "If they think you're working on something that they don't think is important, they'll say we have too many resources and cut our budget," a policy that only encourages people to disguise what they are working on from upper levels of management so that they can get done the things that need to get done. There are three differences, though. First, businesses periodically clean house, whereas government only does so up at the top (the elected officials). Second, businesses give bonuses for cutting costs. Third, (well-run) businesses do not generally cut the budgets of departments that do not use all of their budget. They reward it. Fix those last two things, and you might get away with not having to do the first.

      For example, most government departments could be vastly improved in their efficiency by taking cumbersome tasks and throwing computers at the problem, yet many of these departments still use technology that borders on stone age, like passing Excel documents

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    9. Re:Return on Investment by EvanED · · Score: 3, Informative

      The chairs attached to a small writing pad (like the one linked to) are just horrible for a lecture or class. You can fit no more than a small notebook on the surface: want to get out your other notebook, a handout, or your laptop, and take a look at both at the same time? Tough luck!

      You think those are bad for most people? Try one if you're left-handed. I've been in rooms with desks like that bolted to the ground where it's about equally comfortable to use the "desk" attached to my chair as it is to use the desk attached to the chair to my left.

      The ones with desks that actually stretch across you the whole way aren't too bad, but still noticeably worse if you're a lefty, and a lot worse for everyone than an actual desk.

      Sometimes you'll even get a room with lefty desk-chairs. Of course, there may well not be enough of them, and you may well be stuck at the edge of an aisle instead of being able to sit where you please, but that's what you get for being a southpaw.

      (I'm not bitter. Not at all.)

    10. Re:Return on Investment by Korin43 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You get plenty of free time after college.

      Yeah, since your "childhood" is only ~1/4th of your life. Wasting that is no problem at all.

      Yes, I'm still bitter I didn't stick with piano lessons.

      I, on the other hand, am bitter than I wasted so much time in pointless classes when I could've been learning to program.

    11. Re:Return on Investment by nbauman · · Score: 3, Interesting

      you have communism where there's no incentive to do better because you don't get any more, so nothing gets done very well.

      A common misconception. I once edited a business management book, and one of the case histories they gave was a Soviet factory. The Soviets started off with a 5-year-plan, and assigned quotas to different industries and different factories or farms. Suppose the factory was building window glass. The factory manager would bid on the amount of product that he wanted to manufacture that year. If he produced exactly that amount, he got a bonus (and so did the workers in the factory). If he produced more, they got less of a bonus, and if he produced less, they got no bonus at all. So the Soviet Union had a clever incentive system.

      I'm not sure what went wrong in the Soviet Union, but I'm not sure it was Communism. When they converted from Communism to capitalism, things got *worse*. (The health care system collapsed, and life expectancy declined by about 10 years. Journalists get shot in the streets. Ethnic separatists set off bombs.) The Chinese continued with Communism, gave the factories more autonomy, and now they're the world's industrial engine (prosperous in the coastal regions, still impoverished in the rural regions).

      The more I read the Wall Street Journal, the more I think this free market/socialist dichotomy is just an ideological battle by people who simply want to cut taxes for the rich. Well-run government agencies work very well. But if George W. Bush appoints one of his campaign contributors to run an agency, it will fail, just as GWB's businesses failed.

  3. Cheap -- to Replace! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. $40 Price point ... for a reason by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  5. I don't think so.. by Anrego · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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).

  6. Luxury! by spun · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
    1. Re:Luxury! by Toe,+The · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Luxury! by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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!

    3. Re:Luxury! by aquila.solo · · Score: 4, Funny

      Feh.

      We didn't even have a building. We held school out in the open; under a tree if we were lucky. And no writing materials either: we just scrawled our equations, diagrams and other lecture notes in the dirt. And that was good enough for us.

      --Aristotle

    4. Re:Luxury! by c6gunner · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?

  7. Kids like to stand by ShavedOrangutan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Kids like to stand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      NY Times had a terrific article on this a while ago.

  8. Re:SURE! Why not?? by Wonko+the+Sane · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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..."

  9. Re:Seat with a small desk attached to it? by Renraku · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?
  10. Riiiiiiight by dazedNconfuzed · · Score: 4, Insightful

    While adults park their butts in $700 Aeron chairs

    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?
  11. Re:fat kids by Convector · · Score: 3, Funny

    "If you have legs and are flammable, you are never blocking a fire exit."