Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments New seats every day in 2nd grade

Or the teacher institutes a rule that says conflicting students lose seating selection privileges for some period of time. Then you might have an induction period of conflict, but it will taper off or the situation will quickly devolve into assigned seating. Given that it's mid-October and the arrangement stands, the absolute level of conflict is probably not eating away more than a few minutes of time.

Lots of really great feedback here. Thank you! I will work on talking through / role modeling some of these issues with him. I may start by switching up who sits where at the dinner table. We've always sat in the same seats, for 10 years now. The kids sit in the same side of the car when we drive, because carseat for YDS. I can maybe switch him to the other side in one vehicle though, so he's not always behind the driver.

I think this is definitely the case. Also, YDS doesn't seem to know the names of all of his classmates yet, and is quite shy, so that may be another thing we can work on. He knows a few kids from last year (HiCap), but there were only 4 kids from his 1st grade class in his 2nd grade class.

There are 26 kids total.

26 kids juggling for seats is quite a lot chaos. The teacher surely is brave.

My DS had a similar difficulty around getting names straight. We played a game, whereby he would meet a new classmate and find out a neat fact about that person each day. It evolved over time and opened up a friendship that's might no otherwise have been made.

A lot of kids find this sort of thing stressful. It won't just be your son.

Seriously, *I* would find this stressful, and I flatter myself I have outgrown most of my second grade issues. I have been reading about open plan offices where lots of people are travelling or working from home on any given day and every one coming in in the morning finds their container with stuff and plonks down their notebook on whichever desk is free, and I have been thinking about how I would hate that.
I'd speak to the teacher again about your concerns. Maybe she'll budge.

Is this teacher taking classes for her MEd or something? This sounds like an experiment to me.

I believe this would have made my ds crazy.

Interestingly, I worked for a Japanese company. The corporate offices in Tokyo work this way. Each employee has a (nice) locker, where they store their personal items at night. Next to it is a closet area with numbered coat-hooks.

When you arrive in the morning, you put your purse / bag in the locker and take out your supplies (pencil box for most people, small calculator, etc). The seating is otherwise unassigned. It's meant to be collaborative.

I've been in that office 10 times. Even with an open plan, people go to the same position every day, sitting by the same people. If you sit in the wrong place as a guest, you are almost certainly messing up the flow in the office for those that work there daily.

The situation with the open, unassigned seating plan is so uncomfortable for most people that they've unofficially assigned seating.