In the grounds of many secondary schools one often sees untidy heaps of broken furniture that have not stood the test of time. This is because many classrooms, especially in junior secondary schools, are in a poor state. Let’s first look at the desks. These usually have a wooden or metal top and a metal tray below in which students can place their books. And yet in a short time, both the table top and the tray fall off.
So, pupils end up writing on their knees or on stools which they get from elsewhere! But students have lockers outside in which to place their books. Students sit on plastic chairs and they also break when pupils lean back on them, especially if they are sitting at the back of the classroom. During my visits to junior secondary schools on teaching practice, there may be so few chairs in the classroom that two pupils may have to share a stool. And I have even seen two students sitting precariously on a broken three-legged chair! That’s not exactly conducive to learning when the pupils have to focus all their attention on remaining upright and not allowing the chair to send them crashing down onto the floor. But on second thoughts, maybe their teacher had decided that they should carryout an experiment on investigating the laws of physics, in particular, the centre of gravity! However, they managed somehow to maintain their balancing act until the end of the lesson. Or maybe they were training to be acrobats so that they could land jobs with a circus after leaving school!
