Improving Our Home

High school is one of the most stressful times in the life of the average American teenager. You're being told the rest of your life depends on the decisions you make when you're not even an adult yet. Simultaneously being pressured to perform at your peak academic ability and still maintain an active social and extracurricular life outside of the classroom, students need school to be a relaxing and creatively stimulating place. If given the time and money to "redecorate" St. Mark's I would provide students for places to be comfortable and efficient. Like Graham Hill says in his TED talk "Less Stuff, More Happiness" we need to consolidate our lives. Straight board wooden desks would be replaced by ergonomically designed chairs with ample writing space and leg room for those tall kids ;). Text books would be swapped out in favor of laptops, not iPads, where students can research on the web and type notes quickly in the middle of class. Smart boards would take the place of whiteboards, automatically saving teacher's notes and posting them on mySMHS. With enough space to let creativity flow students' time would be better put to use. However, school is still school, and everyone needs a break once in a while. Lunch periods, now less than half an hour long, would be lengthened to provide students with enough time to eat and hang out with friends (social interaction leads to better people skills and is key in healthy brain development in young adults). While all this lounging around is great, students, inevitably, would take advantage of their extra flexibility and misuse their teacher's time. In order to keep students listening, lessons would be more interactive, engaging the students in more enjoyable ways to learn. Pictures, videos, and live action would keep the student involved and is preferred over bland notes on a centuries old power point. The teaching/learning relationship between educator and student is only possible when the student WANTS to learn. These changes would provide enough downtime and relaxation that students no longer dread going to class. They welcome the change in environment and are eager to participate in studies. School should be a place where students go with the intention and ambition of learning something new every day. Without an environment stimulating learning and academic growth, we might as well be, as the great Jack Baldino says, "cavemen eating mud."