This hit home tonight. The school district wants to close the school my son attends (and the other son was slated to attend next year) due to the cost of the renovations they say are necessary (some yes, all that they say? hmm).

It’s a beeeyooootiful building and every classroom has high ceilings and amazing views out of large (and just replaced with all new) windows. It was built in a triangle shape, with a cut-out courtyard in the middle — the classrooms are around the outside, the hallways run along the edge of the interior.

Instead they want them to go to a less centrally located school, built in that 70’s prison/bunker style. With temporary walls instead of real ones, and wee tiny window strips up near the lower ceilings.

Away from the marble and the glory and into the dim corridors and “stairtowers” Blech.

Besides all that, it’s the only school I’ve seen that come close to having some real interaction and mixing of diverse students. I can’t prove it’s the setting, but it can’t hurt them to be somewhere pretty. (The addition put on later? not so pretty.)

Dan, my background is in primary teaching (elementary here down under) and the concept of a classroom that is appealing to students is something I can really relate to. As I’m not full time in the classroom the last few years, it’s been a few years since I managed the sort of classroom that you could classify as “pretty”. When I first moved back to Adelaide from my first permanent job in the country, I got very lucky at my new school with a fantastic class of kids in the most undesirable location in a big open space unit. There were five classes in this large high ceiling building with just head high barriers separating each class area from the other. I was stuck in the middle with a “well” (trendy 70’s indentation in the floor for kids to sit in for group discussion) barricading the back of my “classroom”. So, my task with these mainly ten year old kids was to turn this awkward, unattractive space into something they’d be happy to call their classroom without jealous looks through the gaps at the better housed peers.

We managed to peak that year with the sort of things that might look annoying in some classrooms but seemed to gel in ours. I worked on themes each term and the art, writing and maths tied into that theme for effective displays. One of the themes was “the ocean”, a common enough theme in primary schools and that’s my enduring memory of that year’s classroom. There were paper plate squids dangling from the ceiling, at a height where they were noticed but not interfering, and a pirate ship class collage hanging off the fish net on the side. There were printed stories artfully decorated in coloured pencil and textas (markers) and other thematic based work samples that have now faded into my collective approving memory.

Right now we’re getting our classes ready for a school Open Night and my classroom is slowly starting to reflect the theme of communication. Your ideas of design and attractiveness for the viewer are really helpful now as I try and recapture what seemed so easy and natural back in 1995!

Absolutely! My first two years in this district I was by myself teaching 160ish beginning band students. I had to test the students for instruments and there’s only so far that you can go with worksheets before they get bored out of their minds.

The solution? Posters! I let the students make posters and I would help to pick out which ones would stay and which ones wouldn’t. They put them up on the walls.

Last year, we made “RESPECT” and “RESPONSIBILITY” posters for each class also. I find that the more the students get to do (such as bulletin boards), the more pride they take in keeping the room in good shape.