The Tablet Arm Desk

Are you left handed? Well too bad! You don't get to rest your arm on the side of the desk while you write in your notebook. 

Unless you are lucky enough to have a lefty desk, you are out of luck. Are you big, tall or short? Well too bad, you're squeezed into the desk, or maybe your feet won't touch the ground. 

Nearly every high school in our hundreds of thousands of secondary and college classrooms has this same desk. They are small, affordable, durable — and they may even have a place for students to put their backpacks under the chair. These desks only take up a few square feet, so you can really jam 40 students into the classroom. 

They are really not that expensive, costing around $200 today. They are tough and rugged, and can last 20 years or more. 

This makes them very attractive to the business side of schools. You get a real value for the investment when providing seating for kids. 

But what about the leftys? Better yet, what about learning? Do these contraptions really promote learning? Have you ever tried to do group work with these desks? 

Let's all reflect on our elementary days. Do you remember your kindergarten and grade school classrooms? Centers, tables and chairs, carpet squares and the little toilets. That was a great time. Everything was for us. It was our size and we got to play in the room. 

As we grew older, the room changed. By the time we were in junior high, we had the student desk in rows. We couldn't talk to our friends, even if we were helping them, and the teacher could now easily pass out and collect papers. 

They could lecture and we could take tests. The seating chart made classroom management a snap. School became harder, and it wasn't like kindergarten. 

If you could have a dream classroom, what kind of student workspace would you have? What would really make learning engaging, interactive and collaborative? 

Would a table and chair work? How would you reconfigure them? How would you group kids if the workspace was flexible? Just imagine what you could do. Just imagine what your kids could learn.