Best Seat in the House

By Cindy Reitzi

Teaching involves a lot of psychology. We deal with the obvious “human relations” push-pull variety of psychology. When to push and when to pull; when to nurture or cajole and when to be “stern.”

But teaching also involves psychology of a different type, a multidisciplinary combination of psychology and geography, resulting in chemistry. It’s all about who your students are, where you place them in a room, and what happens as a result. It is something I like to call “room geography.”

I got interested in this idea in college. Where do people feel comfortable or uncomfortable in a room, let’s say a lecture hall of 200? Why do like-minded people seem to find each other in a huge room? Why do people pick the same seat in the same room, even if they have a choice of where to sit? All of these issues can result in productive clusters in a given room or “clique” clusters, which constitute potentially disruptive “special interest” groups. Some of this is self-evident – when given a choice, you sit next to your friends.

This can obviously be good or bad, depending on your personality. I recently made the mistake of letting my freshmen sit next to their friends in class after I had a nice, tidy alphabetical seating arrangement. I forgot. I had once learned my lesson from a previous disaster in summer school, but somehow it slipped my mind. However, I did learn a few tricks from that experience.

For one long week I let students sit where they chose. I got a cluster of friends who talked loudly during journal times and other times. One student’s idea of laughter was a shrill, 1st- soprano scream emitted in the middle of class or any other “quiet” time. (Another teacher I knew later told me that those individuals were some of the biggest “discipline problems” at her school. She wondered who put them all together in one class).

Needless to say, this was disturbing. I changed the seating chart with particular emphasis on gaining leverage with the “screamer.” I placed her next to a plain-spoken, brutally honest young woman who didn’t like the “screamer.” True to form, my direct student “shared” her most certain opinion about the other’s vocalizations.

By the end of the 6th week, the “screamer” was acting like a graduate of finishing school; she was raising her hand, using an “indoor voice,” and politely asking and answering questions. I should have learned an important lesson.

Creating a classroom map – a seating chart – is a lot about psychological balance and strategic placement. “Choice” left me with psychological and physical imbalance in most of my classes: boiling geysers were sitting next to volcanoes and babbling brooks were next to rushing rivers.

In one class, an interesting tangle emerged. A knot of individuals became a “clique cluster” in the middle of the room, the classroom equivalent of an overly friendly mob – harmless, but single-minded and unproductive. It was the psychological version of a tangled highway cloverleaf structure that has no beginning or end in which “but he was talking, too” becomes the standard excuse for noise reprimands.

In all of the unbalanced classes, the noise and energy were becoming deafening, and the simplest classroom directions involved more starts and stops than New York City traffic. I was getting irritated in the extreme. Clearly, I had to unravel this knot, split up that cluster, and alter the landscape.

So I changed the seating chart. I surrounded the volcanoes with a ring of calm reflecting pools for balance; I placed babbling brooks next to stolid boulders to prevent erosion all over the room. Afterwards, I looked at my ecological handiwork, admired my strategy, and saw – using a line from the Bible – “that it was good.” Peace was restored to the kingdom.

Still, it’s not all a negative exercise when you have to change a seating chart to split up the talkative “gangs.” Aggressively friendly extroverts calm down, and utterly silent introverts laugh and speak up in class. And that’s one positive outcome you’re looking for. In fact, some years back, I moved one of my most boisterous, chest-pounding boys next to nice young men I would let a daughter date.

He not only became a polite young man by the end of the semester and told me he enjoyed my class, but he went from a C to an A on his report card. All because he had the right seat in the house?

Maybe.

Posted March 11, 2002