It's not as easy as it looks, designing a seating plan.
First there are the kids you have to seat as far away from one another as you can, and in my homeroom this year there are a few of those. Sometimes it's due to personality conflicts, and sometimes it's because they get along too well and, consequently, are rarely on task when they're together.
Then there are the kids who can, and are willing to, work with anyone. I love those kind students -- they're the ones who can really pull in the potential isolates and truly make the class a community -- and I try not to abuse their good will, seating them with a friend or two when I can.
And there are the ESL kids. I want them to be comfortable (which would mean seating them with their language counterparts so they can help each other decode the English instructions) but I also want them to try to be a part of the class (which would mean seating them away from their language counterparts so that they interact with their Canadian peers more often).
I don't have to do this, I realise that. A couple of my colleagues let their students sit where they like, reserving the right to move certain students to another location if they're disrupting the learning of others. And that works great for them.
But I remember my own Grade 8 experience years ago. In September my teacher, Mr Jordan (a fine man and teacher who recently passed away), let us choose a partner to sit with. And I ended up sitting with Dana all year. I only remember him changing the seating plan once, and I didn't end up being affected at all, except Dana and I ended up moving back one position. Sandra and Michelle were still behind us; Lisa and Pam were still in front of us. At the time I didn't mind, but it wasn't until high school that I finally got a chance to get to know some of the other people in my Grade 8 class, and for some of them I wished that I'd had an opportunity to meet them sooner. Might have helped to make walking into a few of my new Grade 9 classes a little less scary.
And so this afternoon, roughly an hour after I started, I've now got two seating plans ready, one for each of my core classes. Some students will be happy, others will complain, but they all know that in about a month I'll be scrambling them up again.
