The Silence of the Chairs
My name is Burt Savage. After 17 years as a shop teacher, I traded sawdust and power tools for a 5th-grade classroom. While I traded the workshop for a regular desk, I never intended to leave the "design and make stuff" mindset behind. I soon realized, however, that my biggest challenge wasn't a curriculum-it was 24 orange plastic chairs.
Every time a ten-year-old fidgeted, those chairs emitted a high-pitched, rubbery screech against the tile floor. It was more than a nuisance; it was an environmental friction that disrupted every lesson. To my students, it was just "school noise," but to me, it was the perfect "broken" thing to fix together.
Teachers face big-time pressure to meet unpragmatic standards, often at the expense of hands-on creativity. Yet, research shows that the space a kid is in everyday is a big deal when it comes to learning. I decided to turn our noisy classroom into a design lesson, design being my favourite subject.
First, we tried the "tennis ball" fix, but my students quickly pointed out the flaws: they were hard to clean, fell off constantly and there was that rainy recess when I came back from the teachers lounge and found them throwing the balls at each other. But then, a couple of weeks later, inspiration struck me in the gym on a PA Day. I noticed the laminated wood stackable chairs had horizontal rails-like a snow sleigh’s runners. Why not "skis" for our chairs?
Over two years, two separate classes went through the design process. We moved from Ideation (sharing "wild" ideas without judgment) to Prototyping (building messy models to see what failed early). We eventually landed on pine "skis" with deep-pile carpet glued to the bottom.
The transformation was unbelievable. The silence allowed for better focus, but the real change was in the kids. Students who struggled with concentration were leading the drilling and assembly. Their self-esteem soared as they realized they weren't just "pupils" in a chair-they were engineers of their own environment. By solving a "not so small" problem like a screeching chair, they learned the biggest lesson of all: they had the power to change the world they sat in.
Burt Savage, 2025-12-29