Time To Rethink the School Desk? 405
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."
fat kids (Score:3, Interesting)
Funny that I saw this article earlier today.
"CHILDREN have grown too big for their school chairs, a survey of 750 schools revealed.
Teachers said "desk and chair sizes were often inappropriate".
It is understood the NSW Education Department has been taking orders for custom-sized chairs.
Paediatric dietician Susie Burrell said children who were overweight often didn't carry obvious fat but instead looked older than their age."
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/school-children-are-now-becoming-too-fat-to-fit-in-class-chairs/story-e6frf7l6-1225944436838 [heraldsun.com.au]
Kids like to stand (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, 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.
Re:Return on Investment (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
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other side, for reading, it tends to be better having the desk at close to mid-chest level, with a stand at about 60-75 degrees to place the book on (similar to music stands) where there's room for the student to comfortably lean back, or forward without much strain... though movement is important... adding in more recess breaks would help... 15 min for every 1.5-2 hours would do wonders as well as making the lunch hour an actual hour... thereby extending the school day from 5-6 hours to 7-8 hours... which would of course bring outrage of its own.
Re:I'm sure... (Score:3, Interesting)
Answer: Because there is more to education than the measures used to tell us that Japan and England keep kicking our butts. The reality is that there is education for education's sake and there is education for the real world. And Japan and England are failing miserably at the latter.
Real answer: Because Nobel prizes are given for past achievements and the median age of laureates is very high (over 60 I believe and rising). In other words you can have the shittiest K-12 education system in the world but if 50 years ago you had a monopoly on higher education (like say if the rest of the world was still rebuilding from having most of it's cities razed to the ground) than you'll still be getting a lot of nobel prizes.
Re:I'm sure... (Score:3, Interesting)
Follow the link to List of Nobel Laureates, and look at the individuals. Note how many of those "American" Nobel prize winners were of foreign nationality and moved to the US as adults.
What we have is money.
Re:Kids like to stand (Score:3, Interesting)
NY Times had a terrific article [nytimes.com] on this a while ago.
Exercise Ball (Score:3, Interesting)
My kid's class has a half dozen of those big exercise balls. For the more fidgety kids, sitting on the ball at their desk allows them a little wiggle so they can let their minds do what they want. Nobody falls down, and not every kid benefits from the "ball-chair", but it helps certain kids a LOT.
Face it: most office chairs allow at least a rotation axis. If your desk chair didn't rotate a little you'd spend a LOT of time fighting the chair. By allowing a little freedom of movement, you can work with the tool and not against it.
Re:Return on Investment (Score:3, Interesting)
"Meanwhile, in order to get warm bodies into public schooling, the standards for certification just get lower and lower."
What reality do you live in? The standards for certification have increased. Massively. Ever heard of NCLB (No Child Left Behind)? If you have an advanced degree (or any degree for that matter) you are actually UNQUALIFIED to teach in public K-12 schools. The standards for teaching are far higher than most jobs. In my field, I need a degree to be hired. To teach in the schools, I need the degree and a certification. The certification requires additional courses in my field, more courses in general, an internship and many other requirements. Not to mention the requirements for entry into the certification program.
Now it may be true that some states don't care about the actual quality of the certification. But that is pretty obvious from the quality of the education system. And those states that don't have unions don't have good education systems. So unions aren't the problem.
Hell, yes (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, maybe not these overpriced toys. But a rather large number of the chairs I was stuck with in primary and secondary school had a molded and textured plastic seat and back with large metal rivets holding the back and seat to a metal frame. Never mind the ordinary discomfort of such an apparatus. Consider what happens when cloth moves against plastic... you get a static charge. Guess where that discharges? Right through the metal rivets. So in dry weather, sitting in such a chair meant constantly getting shocked in the back, legs, and butt. Real conducive to learning, that.
Here [worthingtondirect.com] is one incarnation of said torture device.
Oh yes, it must be the chairs (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Return on Investment (Score:4, 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.