Open Concept

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence. 

Robert Frost, "Mending Wall"

When we moved to Gilford, in the summer before my junior year, I was fifteen and had already attended five schools since the first grade:  urban, suburban, Catholic, secular, public, private, single-sex, and co-ed. Attending so many schools makes you bad at making and keeping friends, but pretty good at figuring out to adjust to almost any educational setting. When my mother brought me in to register, the person we talked to (the assistant principal, I think) proudly announced that Gilford was “open concept.”  I don’t remember being given an exact definition, but it was supposedly both innovative and experimental:  two things I was not. I imagined a high-ceilinged area with lots of light and space, all black and white except for a Mondrian print that took up an entire wall. After Catholic girls’ school, with my knee socks and uniform, I feared that there was no way I would be sophisticated enough for such a place.

My first class at Gilford on the first day was Mr. Donnellan’s American History class. At Catholic school, most of my teachers had been over 50, a good majority of them nuns. Mr. Donnellan looked about 22 and liked to joke around. Particularly disconcerting was when the teacher in the next partition (Mr. Girardin, I think) would poke his head over (am I right in recalling that the partitions themselves were only about five feet tall?) and tell him to pipe down. It was then that I realized that “open concept” just meant that instead of walls we had wheeled partitions that functioned as walls. And although the area surrounding the school was picturesque, the interior of the school itself was a far cry from the Manhattan art gallery I’d imagined:  the partitions made everything seem like part of a play, as though at the end of the day they would be dismantled and we’d start over with new teachers and new classes.

They always seemed to find rooms with walls for AP classes, too, even if they had to borrow space: a tiny seminar room in the library, the principal's office...(Just an observation—please correct me if I’m wrong about this.)

I went on to love being at Gilford, and I would say that in the six schools I attended in twelve years, it was in the top two. When I went back to do a talk on college writing, just a few years ago, I saw that it was no longer open concept. The entire school had been redesigned and real walls replaced the partitions. Rhetta’s classroom was lovely—full of geraniums wintering there, and light, and art. Was it the open concept idea itself that had failed or Gilford's interpretation of it? I'm not sure, but if we get the chance to go on a tour of the school this summer,  you can judge for yourself whether or not the walls are an improvement.