CURMUDGUCATION: This Is Not What School Will Look Like

CURMUDGUCATION: This Is Not What School Will Look Like

This Is Not What School Will Look Like

Good lord-- the advice/guidance/clever thoughts about how to re-open schools, particularly if any state decides to follow Trump's latest unfiltered brain fart, seem to have been generated, once again, by people who have not been inside a school since they became adults. In some cases, the advice appears to come from people who have never met tiny humans at all.

The CDC joins many folks advising that school desks should be six feet apart. This raises several issues.

First, many classrooms have zero desks. Primary grades often have few or minimal desks. High school labs or shops have benches, not desks.

Second, let's do some math. Imagining that each properly buffered student is in the center of a 6' x 6' square. That's 36 square feet of space, meaning that a class of twenty students would need 720 square feet of classroom-- so 20 feet by 36 feet, just for students. Increase the space if you want furniture like a teacher's desk or bookshelves or cupboards. The 36 square feet is not a new idea; apparently 35 square feet has been a long-standing standard for child center designs, though this article argues that 54 square feet is a better figure for the littles. For the older students, guidelines seem to fall around 30 square feet--but that decreases as the number of "stations" increases.

There are apparently "classic works" about the size of school rooms, and without putting further research into school construction, I can say that classrooms mostly probably have enough room to CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: This Is Not What School Will Look Like