English Room Decoration

English is one of my favourite subjects, so when an opportunity presented itself to help decorate the English classroom, I jumped on it immediately. After all, a patchwork of education sheets of brightly coloured paper is far better than blank white walls, and through doing it ourselves, we free up the teacher for things such as marking or planning lessons or relaxing, which are all vital for the functioning of the school. So in effect, we were doing our duty to the school, making it a more pleasant learning environment, and contributing to the availability of Mr. English's free time.

We asked Mr. English, out English teacher, what and how he wanted put up. We later received an e-mail with all the things that are to be put up, but as my printer's colour cartridge was out, we had to print during lunch. A couple of days later, and we were still without print-outs, due to the fact that we kept missing the ICT teacher, who is the only one that can let us into the computer lab.

In the meantime, we printed off the black and white sheets on colour paper, to make them more engaging, and put those up. I set myself a personal challenge to improve my coordination by actually being the one that sticks them to the wall, and didn't tumble off the chair a single time, which is for me quite an achievement, as a chronically clumsy person.

However, today we ambushed the ICT teacher and basically bullied him into letting us use the room (sorry sir) to printed everything off. This time, we were a mean, lean poster-hanging-up machine. Pauline trimmed, Adam put the blu-tack on, and I hung them up. Within 20 minutes we were finished with the task we had been agonising over for the past couple of lunch times.

I guess the most important thing when doing a task like this is to assign specific roles to everybody, and have a clear way of going about them. No particular individuality or creativity is necessary once the placement has been chosen, so the mechanical nature of such tasks do not have a detrimental effect on the standart to which they are performed. Had we, from the very beginning, told who to print what, everything would have been far simpler and faster. As it was, once we had gathered all the materials, decorating the classroom was simple, but the communication issues that led us astray in the beginning were the biggest obstacle we had to overcome. In future, completely clarifying the task at hand and communicating effectively with each other and the teacher will help us prevent these issues from arising in the first place.

Here is the fruit of our labour:

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