My Classroom

So this the room I have taught in for the last three months. The stuff on the walls is obviously not mine.

On the plus sides,

• It is quite sound-proof to the corridor and outside, so there are few outside distractions; 
• There are windows along the whole back wall, so there’s a decent natural light component; which comes from behind the students;
• There are two air-conditioners, which means it can be cooled or heated rapidly;
• The desks and chairs are sturdy;
• There’s a large storage room attached. 

Things that don’t bother me, but might others,

• The teacher’s desk is tiny. Luckily I am used to keeping a clear desk anyway.
• It is small (literally half the size of my previous classrooms -- 32 sq m compared to 64 sq m), which isn’t that bad as the class sizes are small. 
• The Smartboard wasn’t working, but I never wanted it anyway and I just used it for my PowerPoints. 

On the downsides,

• It is noisy, as a result of the lack of soft surfaces and the small size. One loud student is far more dominant here than in my NZ classrooms. Posting the distracting ones at the back doesn’t work, as the back is so close to the front.. 
• I can’t lock the door. This means I can’t keep late students from entering at their leisure. 
• The absolute killer though, for me, is the lack of whiteboard space. I am used to well over four times as much, and even then I run out. I have found this very limiting, as I can’t have a couple of worked examples on show as I run up a list of practice exercises. 
• Notes have to be done via the projector and PowerPoint, so the class has to move at the pace of the slowest note-taker (which is very slow indeed when you have a limited autistic boy in the class).

Those who know me will wonder why the desks are in groups. It’s not my choice! I was told that I could have them any way I wanted, except I wasn’t allowed to put them in rows. At that point I thought I might as well see how groups worked, and to minimise the change between teachers I just left them the way they were.

It wasn’t as bad as I feared, but it certainly wasn’t a success. The small size of the room negated some of the issues about them sneaking out phones etc -- I could see what they were doing as they were so close. But I had to have quite rigid seating plans because I had to keep the excessively chatty people separated from each other. Having group seating and then seating them in groups deliberately chosen to avoid them talking to each other seems twisted to me. I will be going back to rows in pairs.