First Person

In Search of a Room With a View

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By Douglas L. Howard

When I first received my teaching schedule for the semester, I must admit that I took some comfort in the fact that I had managed to snag a coveted second-floor classroom, popular among members of my department.

Not only was there a parking lot nearby, which would come in handy when the weather was bad, but the classroom was also conveniently located one flight up from my office. I would not have to leave the building to go from one assignment to the other.

I had taught in the room before, and, in many ways, I felt like I would be renewing an old acquaintance. But when I showed up for class on the first day, my department head told me that, because of a scheduling conflict, my class had been moved to another building.

If I was a little disappointed by the news, it didn't last long. In fact, I thought that my attachment to that room or any other was, really, rather silly. After all, what part do rooms actually play in the grand scheme of higher education? In the same way that Keats calls a poet "the most unpoetical of any thing in existence," the college classroom may well be "the most unacademic of any thing in the academy."

Most of the rooms that I have been in have not been architecturally designed with a particular course in mind or decorated to suit the needs of a specific discipline. They are mere skeletons -- a few slabs of concrete, some institutional white paint, a couple of blackboards, and five or six rows of chairs that have been married to their desks by a shiny metal bar. They must be equally suited for literature and logic, communications and calculus.

So I didn't think it was such a big deal when I found out that my class had been moved to the Annex Building -- or, as it is more commonly known on campus maps and student schedules, the "X" building. I had never taught there before, but when I started to ask people about it, they either looked at me in horror or smiled inexplicably. "Did you get in trouble or something?" one colleague asked.

Unsure what all the fuss was about, I decided to walk over to see if I could find it. While the other buildings were clustered together on the campus map, the X Building sat by itself in a corner, like the marking for buried treasure.

I left my office and followed the sidewalk as it curved around the perimeter of the campus and snaked off into an asphalt path shaded by a large set of trees. Through the trees, the path opened out into a parking lot, and the red-metal exterior of the prefabricated X building stood out in the distance, snuggled against a set of tennis courts. In the future, I decided, I would probably drive over.

The students also had a problem with their commute to the X building. Before class began I heard them comparing directions and swapping Lincolnesque narratives about the lengths that they had had to go to in order to get there on time. Some came in late, distraught, and out of breath.

No sooner had I handed out the syllabus than the complaints started: about how far away the class was from all of their other classes, about how they would have difficulty making their next class after leaving this one. Many students who did not speak out simply nodded their heads in agreement.

I promised to look into getting a classroom that was more conveniently located. It didn't seem like such a tall order.

As it turned out, the department was more than willing to help. The secretary gave me a list of available classrooms and told me that I could pick the one that would work best for the class. She also suggested that I check them out personally before making my decision.

Since my class was scheduled at one of the busier times of the day, the list was understandably short, but that would only make my decision easier. I was not looking for anything special anyway; all I wanted was a better location.

The first room on the list was a multimedia room with a sound system, a VCR, and a DVD player -- things that would be helpful if I were going to supplement my usual course materials with music or film clips. But my class had fewer than 25 students, and this room had seating for 100. The chairs themselves were bolted to the floor and staggered in rows like the seats in a movie theater.

It was in a great location, but I didn't need seating for 100, and I worried that unless all of the students sat in the first few rows, they might not hear everything that I or their fellow classmates said. Moreover, if I had any ideas about group work, the stationary chairs in this room would make such activities difficult, if not impossible. The more that I thought about it, the more that I realized that the room might not be my best choice.

The second room on the list was certainly more intimate, a long narrow room with just enough chairs for all of the students. The rows of seats were much wider than they were deep, and I had the feeling that the students would be on top of me in this room and that I would be performing a bit of a tightrope act walking around during the class.

Still, this room also had a good location going for it, and I could see the class working here, if need be. I was curious, though, to see what else was on the list.

The next room was a custodial closet that came up as available. Maybe a classroom was not just a classroom. After staring at the mops and brooms and cans of detergent for a minute or so, I moved on.

The last room on the list was a basement classroom with a large white door and a silver metal handle. It almost seemed like a walk-in freezer, but as I pulled it back, I saw a well-lit, spacious classroom with three blackboards and no windows. For some reason, the lack of windows bothered me. Instead of a freezer, it began to feel like an academic fallout shelter. In the event of a nuclear disaster, cockroaches and my class would be sure to survive.

I had taught in rooms like that one before and was always struck by how they desensitized me to the passage of time. Five minutes sometimes felt like 50, and at other times 50 felt like five.

I also remembered how odd it was to leave a room like that after class ended and find out that the weather had changed. A snowy morning had given way to a sunny afternoon. Between breakfast and Oscar Wilde, the seasons had changed. Staring into the empty classroom, I could imagine a character from an E. M. Forster novel whispering in my ear, "Oh, a view! How delightful a view is!"

The great irony of my quest for a classroom is that after visiting all of those rooms, I started to think about all of the benefits of my room in the X building -- away from the center of campus, beyond the trees, across the parking lot, next to the tennis courts.

I started to think about the students comfortably spread out across the rows of desks, about the blackboard that stretched from one side of the room to the other, about the set of windows that I could open and close, about the adjustable thermostat that could go from air-conditioning to heat at the flick of a switch.

It really was not such a bad little room at all.

The students seemed to arrive at the same decision. When we met for the second time, the setting was no longer an issue. I mentioned that I had looked into changing the room, but almost all of the students agreed that they would rather stay put and that the alternatives would inconvenience just as many as they would satisfy.

As difficult as that first class session had been, they had already begun to adapt and adjust. And as the semester went on, the journey to the X building became a bit of a running joke, a kind of weekly endurance test that we all shared.

I would also like to think that there were moments where being removed from the rest of the campus was actually a liberating thing, that gave the students an excuse to contemplate a more radical interpretation.

But even if it did not, I believe that the room affected the class, whether through the allusions that I made to something that I saw in the hallway or outside the window, or through the thoughts and ideas that occurred to the students as they made their way out to the building, just as I also believe that the course itself would have somehow been different had we relocated to the multimedia room, or to the rectangular room, or to the closet, or to the basement room with no windows.

So a classroom may be a mere skeleton, but that skeleton does direct the muscles, the tissues, and the organs around it, and the students and the faculty members who give life to it. Although I am not about to propose or endorse a theory of academic feng shui, I do believe that certain classroom dynamics are better suited to some rooms than others.

In this case, from my search of the campus, X, it turns out, did mark the spot after all.