As Blake begins in-person learning for the first time in over a year, the administrators also made the decision to switch to assigned seating. The two main ways teachers are creating assigned seats are simply letting the students sit down and make their choice seat their permanent spot for the rest of the year, or creating seating charts for the students. These assigned seats are very important to help keep Blake in person. Jason Lonstein explains “You double the population, you double the chances someone is going to test positive, you start dealing with a situation with multiple classes out, so I think it’s definitely going to help”.
The students seem to be understanding, Jackson Gammack ‘24 says “It’s nice to sit next to your friends, but I also want to stay in school and if that is what needs to be done, then that is what needs to be done.”
While it may be hard to not be able to sit next to your friends, there are some positives. Alana Foster-Smith ‘22 states “If you don’t have a lot of friends in the class and are stressed about who to sit with then it’s nice.”
Lonstein also noted that “What’s going to impact the classroom dynamic is being in the classroom. For the first time in a year we are going to have a classroom at full capacity and I think that that is going to impact the classroom dynamic more than the assigned seats”.
