Make Your Class­room Comfortable

It was a typ­i­cal swel­ter­ing day in South Florida, and I remem­ber being stuck in a high school geom­e­try class. This alone was tor­ture enough but, to com­pound my mis­ery, the air con­di­tion­ing had been on the fritz for the good part of the month. With no cool air flow­ing from the vents and no win­dows in the class­room, our only source of fresh humid air was a door propped open by an old wooden chair.

Day after day the class would shuf­fle into the room, only to have their under­gar­ments and socks become sat­u­rated with sweat by the end of the class. Learn­ing was the last thing on our minds. Our teacher made a valiant effort but, by the sec­ond week, not even he could pre­vent the stu­dents from falling asleep mid­way through the class.

The pur­pose of my lit­tle trip down mem­ory lane was to help illus­trate how even the best instruc­tion can fail if the learn­ing envi­ron­ment is not con­ducive to learn­ing. In my case I found the geom­e­try class­room dur­ing sum­mer school much more com­fort­able. Continue reading →