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."

Comments

Hmmm

[Master Moose]

Me thinks that someone wants to sell furniture.

Re:Hmmm

[Romancer]

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.

Return on Investment

[flaming error]

> 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'

Re:Return on Investment

[0100010001010011]

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.

Re:Return on Investment

[phsource]

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.

Re:Return on Investment

[edmicman]

Can we do that for corporate America, too?

Re:Return on Investment

[snowraver1]

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.

Re:Return on Investment

[Korin43]

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.

Re:Return on Investment

[dgatwood]

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

Cheap -- to Replace!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

$40 Price point ... for a reason

[Archangel Michael]

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.

I don't think so..

[Anrego]

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).

Kids like to stand

[ShavedOrangutan]

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.

Re:Seat with a small desk attached to it?

[Renraku]

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.

Riiiiiiight

[dazedNconfuzed]

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.

Re:Luxury!

[aquila.solo]

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

Re:Luxury!

[c6gunner]

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?