three years

It has now been three years I have been at the school. The classroom block I am in is now considered to be structurally safe and will stay. The classroom I am in is still the same as I entered it three years ago. Something has to change.

I was told no money would be spent on the rooms when I arrived as they did not know how much damage had been done from the earthquakes. Something that I am reminded of every day I am in the classroom block with reinforcing steel supporting the stairways that we use to gain access to the 1st Level, as well as the plasterwork in the office that I use as a base of operations.

I wish for them to remove a piece of old learning environments, the plynth at the front of the classroom, where once stood priests teaching lessons in a classroom. The computer LAB I am in still has one of those as well as it still has the french textbooks that used to support the priest when he was teaching in the room, these are in cupboards at he back of the room.

I wish to have my ankles heal rather than get the edge of the corner poking me every time I forget when walking backwards. I wish to not worry about wheeling back in my chair and not failing from a height onto the floor in front of the students. I wish to have space for change in the environment of the class.

At teh moment my classroom is a W shape with no way to walk around in a circle, makes for monitoring students behaviour and tasks quite difficult. I wish to have a classroom that wasn't designed by a non digital technologies teacher, I wish to have a classroom, not a LAB.

One where students can work together on tasks, rather than individually, one where the room could be reconfigured for different lessons. My students never look at the whiteboard, instead they are looking at a wall or out a window. The projector is also at the front of the class, something in which students hear, yes its loud, but never really look at. Maybe a couple of 60" monitors could go where the students are looking, maybe they will see what they are supposed to be doing.