Last week, Cassandra made a really easy fix for me. I teach in a really small room. My room has three long tables. Two of the tables are the same length and the other is about a third shorter than the other two. This is a visual of what the setup looked like:
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The two horizontal lines represent one table and two vertical lines represent one table. For the vertical tables, you had chairs on both sides. It was a hassle for a number of reasons. Students in the middle had a tough time getting out because it was such a narrow space. So, they always had to ask students to move out of the way to get out of the middle if, for example, they wanted to go to the bathroom.
When any students wanted to go to the bathroom, they had to go behind the right vertical table. But, they had difficulty getting through because students' chairs would block some of the way. So again, students would have to say excuse me before going to the bathroom. That sounds really simple, but there are two general difficulties with that. Some students often don't say excuse me. And, the students who are asked to move often do not. So, those are some causes for some unnecessary drama.
Basically, the suggestion that Cassandra made for the two vertical tables was to close the gap between them so that there wasn't this narrow space between them. Instead, students would sit on the outer edges of the tables rather than on both sides of the tables. So, instead of sitting like this:
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They're sitting like this:
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Unfortunately, my diagrams are not particularly graphic, so I'll have to upload a pic tomorrow to give you a better idea.
As a result of closing the gap in the middle, there is a lot more space behind the tables. No one has to say excuse me to go to the bathroom. Students can more often walk right behind others. So, simply putting tables together has squelched a lot of argument, which means that I have more time to teach.
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