Skip to main content

MCC Daily Tribune Archive

Using Brighton Classrooms


The start of the Spring semester is an exciting time: faculty are invigorated, and students are eager to learn. Facilities and ETS have worked over the intersession in our classrooms, replacing computers, counting chairs and repairing the little things that forty-year-old buildings sometimes need.

When it comes to the Brighton classrooms, I’ll give my annual appeal.  If you find you need more chairs for a section you are teaching, please send me an email. Our partners in the educational process from Facilities are great at responding. It can get a little hectic in my office the first couple of weeks of school, so I really appreciate an email versus a phone call.  I really do like to talk to people, but I can’t read my writing after you hang up!  If you find you need 3 chairs, could you let me know right after you’re done teaching that section?  People often wait till an hour before the class is supposed to start to contact me, and at that point it’s a little too disruptive for Facilities to be moving furniture during the time between classes.

Obviously if you are short chairs, please don’t borrow them from the room next door. I know you are thinking of your students, but what about the 12 sections of classes in the room you removed them from? The same holds true if you feel you have excess furniture. We sometimes forget that a typical Brighton classroom can be used by twelve or thirteen faculty over the course of a week. Perhaps your section doesn’t require all those seats, but someone else probably does.

If you are in a smaller room, please be conscious of the size of the room before you green slip too much. If we need to shoehorn four more desks into the room for your section, every other section in that room will experience the overcrowding.  We green slip for the right reason -- to accommodate our students' needs -- but the reality is that some rooms just can’t hold any more furniture.

Again, if there is anything I can do, please let me know. I’ll attempt to look at classrooms in the fourth week of the semester to see if we can remove any excess furniture, so the more accurate you keep your class lists, the better the data for me to react.

I hope everyone on all of our campuses has a great semester!   

Bob Cunningham
Director, Academic Facilities and Learning Environments
01/25/2010