Have you ever tried completing a Sudoku puzzle? Those grids that show up in the daily paper where you have to fill missing boxes with numbers one through nine, and if you get one number in the wrong place the whole puzzle is completely messed up? That's pretty much what it's like trying to come up with a successful classroom seating arrangement.
I make it a goal to rearrange my student desks at the beginning of each month, and for the most part I'm pretty good about staying on that schedule. It helps motivate me when the kids learn to expect a change every month and start badgering me about it if I procrastinate, which I frequently do because it's not an easy task. And I don't mean just the lifting and the moving and the lining everything up, though that's no ride around the lake. If you're a teacher trying to set up a classroom arrangement that's going to work, you have a lot of things to consider:
- Do the students have enough room between the rows to push their chairs back without knocking into the desk behind them every time they stand up? Is there enough clearance for people to move back and forth between the aisles, even during the heavily trafficked times of day like dismissal and fire drills?
- Where do you put the kids with special considerations? Does the student who requires a hearing aid need to be in a particular location because of interference from ambient noise? Is there someone who can't see the board unless they sit in the front row, which they have to all the time because they broke their glasses two months ago and their family can't afford a new pair? Are the students who receive paraprofessional support placed somewhere that will make their desks more accessible for the people who come in to help them? Are the ones who prove all too easily distracted sitting somewhere that minimizes their distractions? Like not even in the same area code as a window that might be opened in the spring?
- How much of a balance are you maintaining when you rearrange the room? If a particular girl sat in the front row for the past two months, isn't it time to rotate her toward the back? Would it help the kid who never remembers to stack his chair at the end of the day if his desk was right in front of where the chairs are stacked so he sees every other person in class doing it? Should the kid who always asks to get a sweatshirt from her locker really sit that close to the window or an air circulating vent that blows cold air for 60% of the school day?
- Then we have some students who should never, ever, ever be sitting anywhere near each other. They're looking for accomplices to help fire up some shenanigans, and somehow they have a built-in radar that finds them co-conspirators before they even know each other very well. A teacher I know once said that it wasn't enough for him to sit one of these goofballs in each of the four corners of his classroom; he needed a room shaped like an octagon to separate them effectively.
- How about that kid you busted for cheating on the last unit test? Guess who's big desk he's going to be sitting by....
- What about the friends? I've put people together because they got along and I had hoped that would be a constructive thing when it came time to work, but I was going off an educated guess. Sometimes it works out well to put friends together. Sometimes it works about as well as putting to high school best friends in the same dorm room for their freshman year of college.
I thought about this all today because I spent about an hour moving desks and name tags around after school tonight. And this was after I had spent at least an hour planning out three different seating charts for my three different classes, hoping it would get them all in the best spot to keep them engaged in the work, and hoping most of them would be generally happy with their final seating arrangement for elementary school.
But not too happy.
