As you may have noticed, we have a seating problem in the 7/8 science lab.
Look down. What color is the stool are you sitting on?
If it’s a grey, metal stool, it was here when I arrived at Bartlett eight years ago. At that point, we had 24 grey, metal stools - exactly the right number.
Unfortunately, many of them were broken.
In the Fall of 2016, I worked out a deal with the welding shop at the Voke and they repaired about eight of them.
Since then, I have been repairing them myself. Look down at the grey stools - you may notice nuts and bolts holding the legs on. That’s my work. I continue to repair the ones that break…but there is a limit to what I can do.
Unfortunately, about six years ago, an ambitious custodian threw away about four of these stools that I had not yet had a chance to repair. Also, one of the teachers that taught in this room while I was assigned to room 22 threw even more of them away.
If you are sitting on a white stool, you can thank my neighbor. She found four white stools on the side of the road in a pile of household items that were being discarded. She grabbed them and then gave them to me for the lab.
If you are sitting on a black stool, you can thank DonorsChoose and the people who support teachers. DonorsChoose is a non-profit organization that connects teachers who need supplies with people who want to support them. All the black stools were donated to us. We did lose one of those this year when it fell over and cracked. My repair was a failure and I had to discard it.
If you're sitting at a lab bench in a standard desk chair, you are experiencing our problem: We don’t have enough stools any more. Some students who want to sit at the lab benches end up sitting in a standard desk chair and those are way too low to be used at the lab benches.
This is a ridiculous problem to have.
At a minimum, you ALL deserve a chance to sit at the lab benches on an appropriately sized chair or stool. <sigh>
