Crowded classroom

Just as the summer was winding down, the boys and I began making trips to the nearby school yard to play baseball and climb on the new, challenging, play-structure made for the 3rd-5th graders who go to school there. Elliott climbs, Dietrich has batting and base-running practice. On our last day there before school started the building was bustling with janitors making repairs, teachers setting up classrooms, and everyone catching up on their summer adventures. We could hear the chatter from the playground and peek into the classrooms. I was trying to focus on my pitching, but between baby resting on my tail bone and keeping half an eye on Elliott going down the slide without edges, I was distracted from the game, and drawn to watching what was going up on the walls in the classroom.

I first noticed this at our visit to our local elementary school last winter. Stacks and stacks of books, paper, materials, flip-boards, and laminated you-name-it line the walls of the classrooms. Does anyone ever sort through these stacks? Over the course of a year are all these materials actually used in some way? Or have they been there so long they have become part of the room, as unnoticed as the colors on the walls or the placement of the light fixtures? In the class I watched from the playground, the walls were covered with posters. One was a set of 12, the months of the year. They hung quietly next to the clock. Brightly colored scenes depicted children frolicking in the snow, digging up a garden, splashing in a pool, raking up leaves. The kids were colored appropriately to reflect the diversity of the kids attending the school, the faces all smiling. I pictured the teacher putting in the work order to have the months laminated, then carefully cutting them out and masking-taping them to the wall.

Maybe the children feel comfort seeing the same posters day after day and maybe the teacher uses them to mark the time as the year goes by, using a long pointer to reach up to each new month. Likely the stacks of materials lining the walls and files of materials stacked on the tables have no ill effect on how children learn. I know that our boys have created elaborate scenes of space travel and fire rescue despite the tall shelves of art supplies, games, and toys that mostly stand idle in their play area. But the effect it had on me was a question: what if all these materials are what make a crowded classroom? What if it isn't as much about class size as it is about class composition? How many materials do we really need to learn as is appropriate to a child's age? What if children created their own materials and took ownership in the contents of their room because it is their work? What if we took a break from the images handed to us from scholastic and instead let children create their own images of the months and seasons changing? What if we took a break from the flood of primary colors and smiling faces and laminated posters? Would a classroom freed of unused materials foster more creativity with the materials that are used?

In yesterday's NYT week-in-review Thomas Friedman suggested that American children lag behind children of other industrialized nations not because their teachers are inadequate or their schools lack funding but because students do not take charge of their education. He sighted large numbers of students who feel unmotivated and teachers frustrated with the lack of student motivation. He took our culture of instant gratification to task along with its fuel -- media, video, and computers. But in a crowded classroom, thick with materials, technology, and manufactured images can we be surprised that there is little energy for students to be innovative, creative, and responsible with their education?

Yet I know how hard it is to weed out what is needed, and what can be let go. Those shelves in our basement were part of an ongoing effort to free up some space to rearrange and make an office. I physically went back and forth on what to throw, what to keep. And I do not expect our load of recycled paper and cardboard that we let go of will make a difference in the next effort at recreating space travel. But it has already helped make space for new art on the walls.