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Classrooms built over 30 years ago are not constructed to house today's supersized students. With any "built-in" situation, common among classrooms in the 50s and 60s, the seats are now too close for comfort. Elbows collide, students mushroom out the sides and legs cramp underneath table levels that are now too low. Adding to this, is the now common practice of allowing students to eat or drink most anything during class. Trash bins in classrooms have gone from 6 gallon capacities 30 years ago, to over 50 gallons in most contemporary classrooms. Today's students are only going to get even bigger, making the need to remodel more of an imperative than a necessity.
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One 20-year-old, 6' 6" basketball student I interviewed was certain his height was due to the growth hormones in the milk and meat he ingested growing up. His parents and none of his relatives were over six feet. "If I was born 50 years ago, that's probably how tall I would be," he said, "just six feet."
And then there are the truly "big" students, the ones we frequently see cited in studies on obesity. Those students have a tendancy to challenge many college facilities that were created more than 40 years ago. A bench outside a classroom for students to sit on before class starts may find that it is now coming apart due to the increased stress load of today's student tonnage.
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Even the movable chairs in classrooms are being challenged. I find several of the "wire-frame" style chairs where the welds that hold it together are snapped and broken off, due to carrying loads for which they were never designed. Those cheap, plastic seat chairs can be found splitting down the middle of the seat area, not unlike a pair of pants that are stretched when they're too small. Even the fancier pneumatic chairs on casters are losing their pneumatic, height-adjustable capabilities along with casters being broken under the increased weight stress -- casters made from plastic never designed to hold 250 pounds or more.
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As someone who was heavily involved in classroom design 25 years ago, I'm confident today's classroom designers may be overlooking the supersizing of today's students when considering the larger parameters involved in today's classroom ergonomics.
-Tim Corwin
