When someone I meet who doesn’t go to East asks me about my school, I always begin by saying “Well, we don’t have walls…” which always provokes the raising of eyebrows and a frenzy of questions about how I can concentrate, how students aren’t distracted, and the like. I honestly reply that “I don’t notice it that much,” because I honestly have gotten so conditioned to the living (schooling?) situation that it’s not something that I dwell on.
I didn’t realize how unique our situation was until I shadowed our sister schools, Williamsville South and North, in 2011 and 2013 for Inter-High. I felt contained, almost claustrophobic, as I sat in classes bounded by four walls and felt stifled when I learned that to go to the bathroom, one needed to ask for a pass. At Williamsville South, to be able to leave your assigned lunchroom during your lunch period (notice it’s a lunch period, not a “free” period as we have at East), you had to get a pass pre-signed (unless you were given privileges as an upperclassman). The same went for North. To be able to go to the library at North, you have to get a pass signed by the teacher whose work you will be working on during the class. I’ve heard stories from my friends at North who have even told me that their study hall teachers call the library to make sure you are actually there during the period! It felt eerie, almost Transit-esque (remember the days when we had to ask for permission to go to class, sign out of said class, grab pass, leave pass on desk outside bathroom, sign into bathroom, go to bathroom, get your pass, sign out of bathroom, then sign back into class?).
Even East’s scheduling sets it apart from the other district school. When we don’t have a science lab, we get a “clinic” period where we are free to go to the library, Commons, or to talk to a teacher to go over homework or material before a test. At Williamsville North, since students cannot roam about freely during free (study hall, lunch, whatever you want to call it) periods, the school operates on a 6 day system in lieu of a 2 day one (this accounts for one science lab every six days with a study hall on the other days). Seeing that I can’t even remember if it’s an A or B day (and find myself forgetting that I have gym half the time), I’m quite sure that it’s a blessing that our schedule allows for teacher and student freedom the way it does.
So much on our experience at East is based on the fact that we do not have walls. The staff at East depends on students to be where they are supposed to be, giving them independence to roam about during free periods. Instead of checking every student walking around the hall for a pass, teachers assume that students in a class will not be wandering about and that these walking students are students in free periods. We’re given the independence to decide what we are going to do with our free time and to budget it (say eat in the commons with friends for 15 minutes, walk to the math clinic to ask Ms. Yermas about last night’s homework for 10 minutes, then spend 20 minutes in the library studying for today’s bio quiz), making us much more prepared for the complete freedom that college will give us in four short years (or for the Class of 2014, 3 seemingly long, but relatively short months).
To me, East’s lack of walls is not only literal, but symbolic. It’s this idea that our school gives our students the freedom to choose— to choose to listen to your teacher in class instead of having wandering ears, to choose to use your free period to work instead of walk around the hallway and distract math classes, to choose to ask for help instead of being handed it. The idea of constructing walls hurts my mind too much (as does the idea that we’re getting bigger lockers— what if the next class of freshmen begin to take after their other Williamsville school counterparts, carrying purses to class because they can depend on hoarding all their books and notebooks in their humungous lockers??!).
Having walls at East would make it un-East. How else would you start a conversation with a stranger about your school? Without walls, teachers can collaborate with each other in clinics, and you can see that teachers connect and have built relationships with each other within their departments as well as with other teachers in completely different fields (I’m pretty sure I see Mr. Kryder in the music department with Dr. Schewann just as much as I see him in the English clinic, and Mr. Huber and Mrs. Williams co-advised Unity in Diversity before Mrs. Williams moved to California). By boxing them into rooms with concrete (or dry) walls, this environment of cross-curricular friendship and bonding will deteriorate, having walls literally built between teachers.
Though few of us attribute our mindsets towards education to the open classroom model at East, I really think that we underestimate how much we have been taught in a cross-curricular manner. In the music wing, students in all ensembles and music theory classes write a composition for the annual district Poetry, Music, Dance, and Art Celebration that correspond to poems that English students submitted earlier in the year, and I’ve made several comparisons between history and English classes, like when I connected Kennedy’s response to the Birmingham Campaign to Heaney’s essays on Northern Ireland. We learn about chi-squared tests in AP Statistics and perform a real chi-squared test in AP Biology. We’ve learned how to not learn information in boxes in our brains, but instead to let the information make connections outside of that classroom.
Currently I’m living in this state of uncomfort whenever I walk up the secret staircase and see Mr. Nogowski’s classroom boarded up within walls. I can’t imagine an East building without walls, and I doubt anyone else can, either. But I’m not going to despair– the current renovations are only building walls where they already existed, so here’s to more years of being wall free.
