Riya Mukherjee ’23 | Gavin Schmidt ’24
We believe that the current designated study spaces for students, like lounges and the library, do not allow for productive work due to the high volume of speaking. We ask that EA provide completely quiet areas for students who cannot work in loud spaces.
During free periods, students are first encouraged to study in their class lounge. Although these spaces are beneficial for peer-to-peer discussion or socialization, the students who would like to work in silence cannot utilize them due to distractions. Furthermore, many students prefer to eat in their lounges, making the tables sticky or dirty. Studying on these tables proves difficult.
The library is another place where students can work. However, due to its larger space and central location near the cafeteria, an increased influx of students has caused the library, similar to class lounges, to become a noisy area. While collaboration and conversation is inevitable, students in the library should be mindful of their volume and higher-volume activities should occur in the lounges. In addition to students conversing with each other at a regular volume, some middle school classes also take place during various blocks. Although students may use the small individual rooms in the library, they are limited, and students must ask to utilize them.
Photo Courtesy of Gianna Trala ’23
The decreasing access of individual space within the library was caused by the recent relocations in the Campus Center. Andrea Yu, Upper and Middle School Librarian, details its impact on the library configuration, explaining, “Over the summer, the second floor of the library was repurposed into the college counseling office because the college counseling office was repurposed into the growing DEI office. With the loss of that space, we had to move the middle school collection downstairs, and we lost a lot of the group study space that used to happen pre-COVID.”
This crowding has led Yu to make the unfortunate decision to not allow student access to the individual study rooms for general purposes. She informs, “The decision to close that to students was not one that we planned on making… In the interest of equity, but more so in the interest for those spaces to be reserved when someone truly needs it for conference call, faculty or student, those were set aside.”
Decreasing sound-proof individual spaces within the library has caused an increase in general noise level. Sabrina Burnetta ’23 dislikes the increased level of conversation in the library, saying, “Because seniors have so much work to do right now with college applications and mid-semester grades coming up, it’s really hard to work in the library when it is just constantly so loud with the increase of middle schoolers and classes occurring. It’s really hard to find spaces on campus that are actually quiet [enough] to get homework done.”
Eshika Tangri ’23 shares Burnetta’s sentiment, stating that “middle school classes in the library have been extremely disruptive, because I’m trying to do my homework and then there are middle schoolers screaming.”
The library has attempted to address noise issues through temporary measures like the availability of noise-canceling headphones. Yu says, “We do have some Bose noise-canceling headphones, which do work well in that they fit comfortably around the ears and they also have the option to put on white noise, so it cancels out the other noises around you, especially if you are putting music on top of that.”
As workspaces such as the library and class lounges are no longer viable for students who require a quiet space to concentrate, we propose that a designated classroom or other space is made available for silent work. While there may not be a specific classroom free during each period, the room could rotate based on availability. The room could be open to any sophomores, juniors, or seniors during their free periods as a completely silent space. In order to ensure the space remains quiet, a teacher could proctor the space.
This is not a radical idea: colleges across the country feature the same basic concept in their libraries. Traditionally, ground-level floors are loud spaces filled with tables and whiteboards for collaborative work. As one reaches the top of the library, the noise level decreases from conversation to whispers to finally complete silence. We recognize that this exact model is not feasible given our current set-up with lounges, libraries, and classrooms, but we believe that a tiered level of concentration and volume can be established within the upper school community.
While this idea is supported by the administration, space issues remain the biggest challenge. Head of Upper School, Michael Letts says, “We are tight on space. I know in some blocks we actually have no open classrooms. Finding space for quiet study, for study halls, and just for classes, is getting to be more and more of a challenge. It is certainly something that we [the administration] thinks about as far as trying to find spaces and create spaces where students can get some real quiet work done but it’s tight.”
Despite the space issue, Letts asserts that our plan would be possible, saying, “There are certain blocks where we have nowhere to go, but in the ones that we do, we could certainly do that and have them proctored with faculty members to make sure that they stay quiet spaces.”
With recent expansion efforts using the Shape Tomorrow campaign, we hope that future re-designs of the campus can factor in and include quiet spaces, so that students have greater variability in terms of noise level and ambiance in their workspaces.
With regards to expansion, Letts says, “We’ve talked at the admin level with a master planner and architects to think about the future. You have to appreciate that envisioning that, designing that, thinking about how you might want to reshape the campus, what are our needs (certainly placing classroom spaces and student spaces at the top of the list), requires funding and even if you get to that point, permitting, zoning, going to the township, getting approvals is at best three, four years away.”
One of the administration’s ideas is to expand the Campus Center. Letts explains, “What we’ve seen and talked about is expanding the Campus Center and actually even connecting it to the Athletic Center from the library and the art studio space coming across to that green space in front of the Athletic Center. It would be utilized for anything from new lounges for students, quiet study spaces, creating a full student center where you might have college counseling, student support, academic support. Again, that’s certainly based on what we see as need: student space. But it’s at best years away.”
Whether it’s an English essay due next class, or the stress of college applications, a designated quiet space would provide students with a distraction-free environment to encourage focus and to accomplish what a free period is truly for: to complete work. For now however, we hope that our school continues to work towards creating silent areas in the space that we do have.