Preparing the classroom

When I was a kid, I probably thought the classrooms we walked into at the start of every September were designed that way from the beginning, with all the posters and colorful borders and alphabets and number lines carefully installed according to the teachers’ guidelines by whoever built the building. As a grade school kid it was often hard to imagine any of my teachers having ever done something other than show up to school everyday. I do remember the classroom decorations complementing the personality of each teacher, from Mrs. Q’s “Texas Fly Swatter” in 7th grade to the skull dubbed “Mister Morehead” (more head than hair!) Mr. K kept on his desk in 9th and 10th grade history.

My first September as a teacher my decorating involved making a panicked shopping trip to the teacher supply store on Livingston Street in downtown Brooklyn the day before classes started and loading up on colored paper so I could hide all the ugly corkboard in the classroom. The other thing I remember buying that day was a chalkboard compass, even though I wasn’t sure I would ever need to use it. It struck me as something a math teacher should have in his classroom.

The main decoration in my classroom is a print of M. C. Escher’s Metamorphosis II that stretches across the entire top of the blackboard at the front of my room. I also hang a couple Jasper Johns posters in the back of the room (Flag and Map) whenever I get my hands on enough tape to hold them up. Most of the decorations in my room are things like plastic penguins, toy soldiers and a Yoda action figure that are stashed about the room for the wandering eyes of students to discover. I am not entirely sure what this says about me, but I think those semi-hidden items reflect my personality reasonably well.

The standard math classroom decorations on sale in most teacher supply stores seem to be packs of posters that feature a dense, uninspired layout of figures and formulas. I understand the possible benefits of these types of posters, as they provide students with an opportunity to reinforce things they learned in class when their eyes go wandering about the room. Yet I am not a fan of them. First, the majority of the ones I have seen are artless at best and ugly at worst. I don’t want to look at them everyday! Secondly, part of me believes that posting a bunch of out-of-context formulas on the walls reinforces many students’ idea that math is all about memorizing formulas and picking the right one for a problem. Lastly, the posters seem like a generic item tacked up by a teacher who was hounded by the administration to decorate his room. The one pack of geometry posters I bought 6 or 7 years ago after administrator mentioned decorations in three consecutive reviews has been languishing in my classroom closet for 5 or 6 years now, ever since I went and picked up the art posters I mentioned earlier. The connections of Escher and Johns to math may not be immediately recognizable, but they make the room feel more like my place, which strikes me as something more important than having a few more formulas for students to gaze upon.