My Last Semester Classroom

Posted by Naomi Rockler-Gladen Jan 20, 2007

Here's another entry in my ongoing series about my last semester as a professor.

So this semester, one of the classrooms I teach in is in the Animal Science Building. Don't ask me why Speech Communication classes are in the Animal Science Building, but whatever. As long as the VCR works (which is never a foregone conclusion), I don't really care.

Anyways, this classroom is set up in a very hierarchical way. My ideal classroom has the desks placed into a circle so that everyone can discuss with each other easily, and so there's not such a strong sense of professor-student hierarchy. Unfortunately, the classes in my department are too big to do this, but I still like to ask students to put their desks into small circles to discuss issues.

In this classroom, none of this is possible. The room is on an incline, and instead of desks there are tables in ascending rows like bleachers. The chairs are attached to the tables, so they can't be moved around. I felt a little sad when i walked in and saw that set up. Have we not gotten past the idea that the role of the professor is to stand in front of the room and insert knowledge into the brains of passive rows of students?

I've had worse classrooms though. As a graduate student, I taught in a classroom where the seats were attached to the floor with heavy chains. I suppose in some professor's minds, that's the next best thing to chaining the students down to the desks, To maximum classroom hierarchy, the front of the room had a raised platform for the professor. To maximize impersonality, each desk had a huge number printed on it! Happily, that classroom isn't there anymore because the building was considered uninhabitable and condemned, so my students and I will probably get some bizarre form of cancer twenty years from now.

My current classroom has its own random weirdness. Since we're in the Animal Science Building, the walls are filled with posters of farm animals that presumably are to be raised and eaten. A big poster of sheep proclaims something about "dual purpose." And one of the cow posters says, "The udder side of the beef industry."

A special touch of randomness for my last semester.

Here's the index to all fo the articles in my ongoing series about my last semester. More to come soon! And hey, I'd love it if you would leave some comments in the discussion.