You haven’t had the full Liberty experience until you’ve been stuck in a first-period portable class in the dead of winter. As you hunch in your chair hoping to preserve placebo-levels of warmth, your breath misting in the air around you, your hand fumbling your pencil as you scratch out a shaky bubble, you wonder if it’s worth the automatic F to burn your test for warmth.
Exaggeration? Who, me?
It only takes a single step into a classroom to tell if the next 50 minutes will be spent in a warm, cozy room or the lair of the abominable snowman (not counting the teachers). If all your classes are the former, then good job! Stop bragging. If it’s the latter, good luck. Thoughts and prayers.
I’ll start off with a spicy opinion: cold classrooms suck. They may be a universal part of the student experience, but they really shouldn’t be. I shouldn’t be worried about how to best warm up in my seat or wonder whether my nose will be running the next day while my teacher is explaining a concept that the entire course hinges on.
(And no, the cold really doesn’t help students focus, regardless of what your first-period-portable-class teacher has said to justify leaving the windows wide open.)
Also, don’t get me started on fashion. I’m not a fashion-forward person, but maybe that’s because I’m wearing a puffer jacket, over a sweater, over two layers of clothes. If you want to look good, you will be cold, and–don’t get me wrong–I genuinely respect the people who make that decision. However, at the end of the day, I shouldn’t have to sacrifice one or the other
Perhaps the subzero temperatures are the result of our failure of an HVAC system, but when a freezing blast hits you as you enter that one classroom in the hallway, Jack Frost nipping at your heels, the sharp air whispering promises of an impending winter wonderland, there’s usually a human factor at play. (You get a pass if your classroom previously housed the school’s servers.)
If teachers didn’t intentionally fiddle with the thermostat settings in an effort to be quirky and kept their classrooms at a somewhat-reasonable temperature, students wouldn’t have to lug around winter coats in their already sizable bags.
Why can’t learning and comfort go hand-in-hand? We need warmth to learn. And at the very least, if you’re a teacher, PLEASE close the portable doors.
