If you have children, you have probably been preparing all summer for the start of the school year. However, going back to school will be unlike anything we’ve ever experienced before. Many children will face long days in Zoom classes to prepare for distance learning. Many more students will enter a school where they will have to stay two metres away from their friends and where they will have weird plastic shields on their desks.
There is no one way to go back to school this year, and while parents have been making unusual back-to-school purchases (desks and headsets for distance learners, hand sanitiser and masks for face-to-face classes), teachers have also been preparing.
Teachers returning to face-to-face teaching have to find ways to make their classrooms as engaging as possible while still adhering to safety guidelines. Fortunately, there are some very creative teachers, and Jennifer Birch Pierson is one of them who is getting a lot of attention.
Jennifer Birch Pierson is a kindergarten teacher in Texas, and she has transformed her students’ desks in a very original way. Instead of using boring desks with plastic shields attached to the front, she got creative and turned each desk into a little truck.
These truck-shaped desks will hopefully bring a smile to the faces of the children in her class (although you won’t be able to see it as they will be wearing masks). It hardly makes up for the difficult school year ahead, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.
One comment says: “This is amazing!!! The children who walk into this room are going to be so excited! Well done and good luck to the teacher ??.”
Another person wrote: “Thank you for making it an inviting place, especially for kindergarten, it’s so sad and inappropriate to expect children not to play when we know that’s how they experience the world around them.”
Another comment says: “I have always marvelled at the way teachers decorate their classrooms. I bet the children will just be happy to be there with their friends.”
Yet many other comments point out that most classrooms don’t look like this and that the teacher has probably paid for the alterations herself. One person commented, “Very cute, applaud this teacher for her creativity and heart… however, this is unfortunately not what most children’s classrooms look like… she is literally one in a million.”
Another person pointed out that “many schools don’t allow this type of decoration – they’ll go in and spray disinfectant, which could ruin everything.”
If you have children, will they go back to school in person or online? Do you think schools should pay teachers to make pretty modifications like this to desks?
