Teachers Use Walls as Palettes to Liven Up Their Classrooms : Education: Decorating takes calculation and guile, they say. Many try to make their artistic efforts relevant to the current lesson.
Architectural Digest it was not.
But Julie Melillo thought the decor in Nancy Butler and Erna Rabuck’s classroom was “pretty.”
“I like the kitty posters and the lions and the cheetahs,” Julie said, neck back, eyes focused on a row of cats shaded in--suitably enough--primary colors.
The 5-year-old kindergartner at Meadows Elementary in Valencia is one of thousands of children in the Santa Clarita and San Fernando valleys who will be judging the creative efforts of their teachers as school begins.
The images might be cute and cuddly, but the teachers say decorating classrooms takes calculation and guile. They spend their own money, sometimes thousands of dollars over the course of many years, just to make their rooms memorable.
They bring in collectibles, like autographed photos of Johnny Carson, or vintage model airplanes. And they try to make the things on the walls relevant to the lesson at the time, changing decorations to keep the students interested.
“They spend days doing this,” sighs Mike Pace, the assistant principal at Meadows. “It’s like when you walk into a house. It’s that first impression.”
Construction paper seems to be the medium of choice, but teachers say the best papers they get to hang come from the students themselves.
“[The students] take pride if their paper is up there,” Rabuck said. “It gives them a bit of self-esteem.”
Humans have an almost instinctive interest in designing their personal space, says Ildiko Choy, an interior design instructor and architect who teaches at Cal State Northridge. But public spaces can be difficult, because they must be shared, she noted.
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Yet Choy says educational institutions have a special role, and should be encouraged to put up motivational displays, particularly of student work.
She declines to use the word decorate in terms of creating classroom ambience. Yet, she says, teachers should try to create displays that are aesthetically pleasing. “It could be very tacky,” she said. “There should be some kind of outlined area [for student work].”
If teachers do not set an example of good aesthetics in the classroom, students will never learn how to make things orderly and attractive in their own homes, she said.
Because so many students have no beauty at home, making their space at school aesthetically pleasing can make a huge difference in the child’s quality of life, said Edie Pistolesi, a Cal State Northridge art professor.
But so often schools ignore students’ aesthetic needs, she said. “Some schools look like jails,” she said. “Most of the schools were built after World War II, cheap and vast and cinder-block.”
But she allows that some schools are really trying to make things better, using paint, plants or maybe even a beanbag chair to make the space comfortable.
“A teacher can take a space,” she says, “and make it heaven.”
American classroom tradition remains, however, in standard decorations. Teachers still display the little yellow cards featuring the alphabet, the snazzy flash cards that illustrate numbers with objects. But now there’s more. Classrooms these days feature the big and the eye-grabbing--a life-size English bobby, a pink and purple polka-dotted dragon, live iguanas.
Take Betty King’s room for example. A paper tree spreads out over her north wall, with green leaves that will fall with the season and paper animals that will hibernate in the winter.
Amid the branches, though, King has reserved pools of space. That’s where she’ll put up things from the kids. “They like it to be their room,” she said.
High school students don’t mind sharing their space, said Jodi Ferry. She’ll be bringing in geckos, iguanas, a frog and a turtle for her biology class at James Monroe High School in North Hills.
“I personally am not too fond of animals,” Ferry allowed. “I just hope to God the kids take to them.”
Ferry has had animals in her classroom in the past. The kids take care of them and learn from watching their behavior. But she stresses they are only observed, not dissected.
“I used to have birds, but they were so loud,” she said. “The kids would hold them and they were squirmy.”
Things are a little more subdued in her husband Frank’s 10th-grade social studies classroom at Valencia High School. He has put up inspirational posters and a red, white and blue welcome sign for his students.
“What you put up on the walls is a reflection of who you are,” he said. “If I show students [I’m] prepared to teach . . . then hopefully they’ll come to school prepared.”
Ferry has incorporated another message into his decor. Behind his desk he hangs a flag with another message: “Don’t tread on me.”
Other teachers toss up their hands and just let the students do the decorating. In Mary Purdy’s choir class at Canyon High School, the students are planning to start working from above.
“We’re going to put [inspirational] posters on the ceiling, so when kids go to sleep . . . they can wake up and start singing,” quips choir president Brian Nichols, 17, a senior at Canyon.
Outright snoozing isn’t really allowed, but teachers do realize that no matter how sterling their lessons, students will daydream in class--as often as once every eight minutes by one teacher’s estimate.
So integrating the decor into the lesson--putting up a map of Greece, say, while studying the concept of democracy that the ancient Greeks advanced--can be as important as adding splotches of color to otherwise drab walls.
“I don’t think it’s very stimulating to look at four walls,” says Dennis Lynch, a Canyon High School history teacher, who spent Thursday busily stapling drawings of former First Ladies on his bulletin board. “But I’m enormously entertaining, so [the students] don’t need to look at anything else.”
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Just in case their attention wanders for but a brief moment, Lynch has put up group pictures of members of the academic decathlon teams and framed photo collages of former students.
“They’re proud they survived the class and made the wall,” he said.
And whether they tell their teachers directly or not, students say they can read their teachers by what is hung on the walls. Poor efforts in decor show a teacher “isn’t very creative,” said Nichols.
Parents notice too. When Val and Gary Melillo decided to move to the Santa Clarita region from Reston, Va., they visited many schools before deciding to move near Meadows.
“We got a warm feeling,” Gary Melillo said of Meadows as his daughter Julie and son, James, 6, scurried about the room examining teacher Betty King’s decor.
“Some institutions are so sterile.”
