HS science teacher here. I'm lucky in that I have lab tables that are standing height(there are of course stools as well).
All the other teachers are not so lucky. One of the reasons that a typical classroom has desks in rows is because that's all the school provides. Most teachers at my school would love actual tables to group kids at. Tables are so much more flexible; you can have stations, group discussions, combine them for a round table discussion, etc. Kids and teachers can move around to the different tables much more easily than desks in rows.
Your average school desk is also just a POS. They are too small for most HS students (and not just because "The Yanks are fat" you rude foreigner :P ). They are lousy build quality. They are too low to the ground. ADA height tables are actually taller than student desks. This also kills teachers' backs when we have to bend over the check student work.
I would love if we had standing tables but they are expensive (especially for "school grade" tables) and schools would rather spend money every year replacing crappy desks and buying smart boards.
Edit: Also as teachers we are told to be "more engaging" but then when administrators do walk throughs and observations we get docked for having the kiddos moving around the classroom and talking because some of the admin are not used to anything other than teachers lecturing to a quiet, obedient classroom.
Oh dear. SMART Boards. I hadn't thought about those for a while. They were all over my high school, and they were such a waste of time and money. One of my favorite memories from high school was when a teacher mistakenly drew on one with a permanent marker.
+1. It certainly helped that they had a computer and a digital projector, rather than the old overhead projector, but most never used the whiteboard part.
Also reminds me of parents who are hurried, and say, 'Ok I'll just throw my kid in the stroller for today, even though they are old enough to stand/walk around today... Its just that I'm in a rush and I cant move as slow as them, i need to speeeeed down the streets to do all my errands.'
So the kids are already sitting down when they are 4/5 years of age and the body is really , really trying to develop and get a sense of bone/structure/alignment but is already being corrupted by having been locked into a stroller every day mom/dad goes out for errands with them. Sheesh!
It's crazy! We have a two year old and go to the zoo fairly often. Almost every other family has kids twice her age sitting in strollers. She can walk around for 4 hour stretches no problem. We were playing Pokémon Go when it was all the rage and she'd just walk along with us for miles at 18 months old.
It makes sense that once kids get too big to hold for long periods of time they'd be able to follow along with a roaming band thousands of years ago (not rushing everywhere, but walking at a decent pace). Kids have the capacity to do a lot more than we give them credit for, and not allowing your kid the opportunity to walk for long stretches does them a disservice in the long term.
My four year old likes to be lazy when walking, but she'll run at the playground for hours on end. I used to bring along a strap when we'd take her tricycle to the store half a mile away so I could drag her home since she would whine about being "tired" (read: too lazy to put in the effort since I know daddy will pull me home).
For the past few months whenever I take her out of the home she now has no choice, I'm not going to bend over to pull the thing as the strap gets left at home - she's stopped being such a pill about it as time has gone on. I'm glad I did this, we're going on a trip to Boston at the start of May and she's going to have to suck it up and walk around with mom.
Not OP and not a parent. HOWEVER, I find it logical that if a brief rest break (maybe a snack and a nice sit down somewhere?) doesn't get things back on track it's probably time to go anyway.
Do you know families that really do this every day? Because honestly, I'm dubious that many parents would be so out of touch that consistently. I can imagine some folks resorting to this sort of thing periodically, no question: I think that every family with kids makes some compromises that they'd prefer not to. But by the same token, every family with kids also has some positive things that they're unwilling to compromise on at all.
Maybe that parent you saw putting a big kid in a stroller is in a rush because they're committed to getting errands done in time to be home for the daily family dinner together that they hold sacred. Maybe they just stayed a little too long at a nature center standing back and letting their kid take risks and learn independence. Or yeah, maybe their errands are often hurried like that because they're a single dad or mom working long hours and there just aren't enough hours in the day to keep the household running. (And maybe some of the parents you see being beautifully patient and encouraging with their kids while running errands are burned out by the time they get home and just plop the kid down in front of a TV with dinner on a tray until bedtime... and hey, sometimes that's the sort of thing you need to do.)
Point is: Parents put up with constant judgemental attitudes from people around them, no matter what choices they make. So if you see someone with a kid who's not doing things the way you would have, try to make your default assumption "I'll bet there's a decent reason they made that choice" rather than "What an awful person." [Caveat: I'm less willing to extend that tolerance to people actively hurting their kids, physically or emotionally. But those situations are very, very rare, thank goodness.]
Yeah, my 'Sheesh' is more for what today's modern market forces make us do to survive as families. I'm not saying those parents are 'awful', actions like that among many others aren't their 'fault', more just a cause-effect effect of the fast paced city reality.
> Maybe that parent you saw putting a big kid in a stroller is in a rush
Failing to recognize special circumstances , such as parent is in a rush (and other examples OP mentioned), and over-generalizing to form a character judgement is textbook Fundamental attribution error.
I find this sort of attitude to be fairly insidious, you're suggesting that kids should become the entire focus of a parent's life, which is actually just as harmful.
"Make your lazy-ass kids walk when they're capable, even if it's temporarily less convenient to you" isn't saying that kids should be the entire focus of parents' lives. It's advice that will make parenting easier for them in the future, and is better for their kids.
Same for lots of stuff—the easy way out is usually harder in the long run. See also: shutting your kid up with food in public. Congratulations, now you have to carry snack crackers everywhere you go for the next several years, and you kid doesn't learn how to behave without shoving crap in their mouth. They'll probably eat worse at meal times too. Totally worth avoiding a handful of tantrums when they were 1-2yrs old though.
No, just a bigger priority than the least important item on whatever busy schedule you have. If you can't fit your kids into the schedule, and your solution is to half-ass your kids instead of half-assing or downsizing your schedule, then your priorities are wrong.
Even if you yourself (and your spouse) come first, you can treat your kids nicely or poorly. And often it's because we don't think about the impact that we treat our kids poorly. And often when we take the time to think through our interactions, we find them more fulfilling.
And really, we should have kids as a higher priority - probably higher than errands.
For many parents, those "errands" are often focused on providing shelter and sustenance for the kids. Get the kids to daycare or school, get to first job, pick up the kids, get to the grocery, cook food, put the kids to bed, maybe work a second or side job.
Sure, some errands are optional, but many are directly related to the daily grind of keeping the roof, food, and heat provided for.
Seems to be making the more modest a reasonable claim that children should be a central concern in parents actions directed at or involving the children.
We care (well, IMO) for our kids, but my wife and I continue to have our own individual interests and we do family or couple things that the kids would prefer we didn't.
Just because we could lavish our children with 16 hours of undivided attention per day (entire focus), doesn't mean that's healthy for the kids or the adults. The kids need to learn that they live in a collective world that does not revolve around them, and the adults need to have time and space to live their adult lives as well.
I don't know how or why people do this. My parents made us ride in the car with them on weekends as they spent hours driving around looking at real estate to invest in. We hated it but did it. It was quite beneficial (I just wish they bought some)
I don't think helicopter parents and devoted parents are the same thing by a long way. I can spend my whole day (12-13 hours) devoting my attention to my kids without at any point hovering over, or mollycoddling them.
Sure, but most parents aren't capable of doing that well. And even then it is a bit of a stretch. Kids are programmed to learn and don't really need adult interaction that much. They need independent time. Time to explore and make mistakes without an adult helping them. So you can say that is being nearby and being devoted while giving them a semi structured environment. Anyway, we won't solve parenting philosophy here, but the general sense (I know.. normative words) is that a parent that just spends their whole day with their kid is probably helicoptering.
>Kids are programmed to learn and don't really need adult interaction that much. //
I don't think I agree with that premise at all. Even as an autodidact, I'd say that guided exploration/learning/endeavour can be far superior in almost every way.
I'd teach a 5yo archery but I'd never give them a bow-and-arrows and leave them to learn it without adult interaction.
A parent who spends there whole day with there kids has probably taken them out to experience environments away from home?
Do you really drop your 6/7yo off at the woods miles from anywhere with a handaxe and a box-of-matches and leave them to it for the day? Or give them a raspberry pi and a box of components with a soldering iron and go out to the shops? (Or how about a band-saw and some wood!). Or give them a recipe book and an oven-lighter and hope they manage to cook a cake rather than gas themselves and blow up the street?
They can mostly make a camp fire, but please instruct first on using the axe and knife, and check the fire isn't going to start a forest-fire before they light it. Sure, after a few times they know how to chop and cut, how to clear around the fire; but do they know about peat-fires, and think to check for over-hanging branches? They need gentle direction and oversight. But they can't even get to the forest without someone taking them, which needs a devotion of time.
I completely disagree. Child-centered parenting is how you create spoiled, self-centered children that become teens that expect the world to revolve around them and adults that throw temper tantrums in traffic.
Children should be nurtured and cared for but they also need to learn how to fit into the family, which existed before they came along and will exist after they've left the house. They need to learn to be others-focused. This produces responsible, empathetic children and leads to productive and caring adults.
I'm not interesting in discussing anything with someone that deliberately misinterprets what I say in order to fix a strawman that they then set alight.
The oldest reference I know (but can't cite) is that in the 60s researchers tried to teach cats, who had EEG electrodes implanted, to change their brain waves. The cats seemed to achieve that through being extremely still.
The prefrontal cortex has been linked extensively to executive functions and inhibition of motor pathways. For example inhibiting a movement in progress. Children with less developed PFCs, mainly those with ADHD have huge problems sitting still and concentrating. Even beyond ADHD, PFC development is associated with academic performance, willpower and not being aggressive.
In Zen Buddhism, sitting still, "just sitting" is the primary means of training the practitioner's brain.
I don't believe compulsion comes into play here. By the way, do you think that children who enter Buddhist monasteries are there voluntarily? I even doubt that novices in Japanese Zen monasteries are all that voluntary. A cultural thing, maybe.
And believe me, meditation often feels coercive, even if nobody on the "outside" is forcing me. I'm forcing myself. Which is will power on a slightly larger scale than the one to restrict movement.
Sitting still is bad for the back. How is doing something that you don't want to do strengthening your will power?
Disclaimer: I hated sitting still in class. At least in elementary, in the Gymnasium (~high school) teachers occasionally complained that I was too passive.
OK. More information on sitting still, it isn't surprising that any action has both benefits and drawbacks - I couldn't find much quantitative information for any more meaningful comparisons.
> How is doing something that you don't want to do strengthening your will power
willpower: control exerted to do something or restrain impulses [2]
If willpower benefits from practice (which I believe it does) then it would be through using willpower to retrain the impulses to not sit still.
> teachers occasionally complained that I was too passive.
Passivity is quite distinct from willpower, likely they were referring to a lack of charisma or independence.
I guess it depends on each child. My son is diagnosed ADHD and even when I'm teaching him 1-on-1 he keeps moving some part of his body or change his posture frequently. It bothered me before, but I learned that for him it's actually easier to work on the task. Restricting movement seems to make some part of his brain hyperfocused and in a short period of time his brain "shuts down".
In his school, the classroom is a kind of free style and although he has assigned desk he can choose other places to work on his task, which seems to help him a lot. (It's Montessori, so most of the time each kid works independently according to his/her own study plan.)
That's exactly what I mean. Children without ADHD are able to sit still and focus at the same time, building that muscle.
Managing ADHD seems to be (from my non-medical non-professional perspective) all about training and using that capacity to focus.
Even for ADHD children, sitting still trains the brain, it's just that they can't stand it for very long, and there seems to be no benefit in forcing them much beyond what they feel comfortable with.
I'm not sure what source you derive from about the particularity of "sitting still". You imply that not being distracted from the given task? Or the physicality of sitting still has the benefit? (The two can be distinguished easily---if the latter is the case, "sitting still without doing anything, and just daydreaming wildly" would also have benefit.) Or you mean meditation? That's a different activity at all.
In the ADHD case, it seems about the way of processing stimuli. They (or at least my kid) need a sort of synchronization stimulus (or, outside distrubance, in the way that disturbance suppresses the divergence of hypersensitive systems) to keep his mind on rail. If no such stream of stimuli is provided, he must create one by his own. I try to make him find and build his own toolset to work with. (One of the activities, for example, is tapping along metronome while doing other tasks.)
[Edit] I see your comment in other thread that you refer to Zen meditation. I've learned meditation and I agree on its benefits, but it can't be applied to the current discussion of school setting---"sitting still listening lectures" and "sitting still meditating" are very different activities. The latter would certainly develop the ability of the former, but I'm dubious about just forcing the former.
Second that. The whole learning process is about substituting cognitive action to behavioral action. Kids can handle it and do it very well. It is important, and I would say essential, to push their limits as much as possible. When I was a kid myself, the end of the school day (in a European country) could be heard block away: hordes of kids running out screaming!
On a side note: Breaks and activity are necessary.
And maybe, through developing better ways to develop a strong PFC, which is crucial to a non-violent society. I do believe that compulsory schooling, and increasing rates of schooling, lowered the rates of violence somewhat. I don't have proof for that idea, unfortunately, but it is plausible just from the idea that school builds discipline or strengthens the attention network in the brain, and that this kind of strengthening has been linked to better self control and less aggression.
> “We need to recognize that children are movement-based,” said Brian Gatens, the superintendent of schools in Emerson, N.J. “In schools, we sometimes are pushing against human nature in asking them to sit still and be quiet all the time.”
Exactly: Schools are bending and breaking kids so that they will be perfectly quiet persons later in life - let's face it, not many people will do work that will require moving around in the future. Also, these kids are likely to not rebel later in life or question authorities, when their resistance has been broken early in their youth.
Honestly, I'm 25 and I had ample time after school to go out and play (or, in later ages, get wasted). Now, when I'm looking at young school children - what the fuck? Sitting all day in school (in Germany we call it "Ganztagsschule") and after school on homework? Or in the US, where regular threads on HN show up about parents getting into all sorts of trouble with CPS because they let their kids play unsupervised? What dystopia is this?
And this "let the kids have some movement through the school day" stuff from the article. What a looooad of bullshxt, it's the same "bend and break them" again. Let the children have time on their fucking own and not their entire wake day dictated from above (0800-1600 or such school, then sports being forced by their parents from 1600-1900 and then homework until midnight).
I'm scared for the future of our society.
Oh, and the biggest joke from the article is this masterpiece:
> “We are not thinking about the child as an entire person, how physical activity helps them cope with the stresses of school and actually benefits them in the classroom.”
What the ...? THEN REDUCE THE STRESS THEY GET IN SCHOOLS YOU ... INSTEAD OF "TREATING" THE SYMPTOMS.
I went to school in the 60s. We did a fair amount of sitting down, but also we did quite a lot of moving about. There was the little field behind the school ('nature table' in the classroom &c) and there was 'music and movement' every day for half an hour with music and instructions broadcast on school radio. Team games, beach walks, and so on. There was also a fair amount of play-like activity in the classroom itself. No national testing.
...which the government is actually doing something about (replacing the tests with teacher-lead assessment). So I agree about the (pointless and counter-productive) introduction of stress into early education.
On the more positive side (I'm an optimist, teachers tend to be) I was in a bank yesterday doing some stuff a bit out of the ordinary and there was a queue. A bank employee toddles up with an iPad and a chip reader on the back and asks me what I wanted to do. We moved to a corner of the large banking hall and completed the transaction. We could just as easily have been in a large public room somewhere or a cafe. The future could include a lot of movement!
I went to school in the late 90s/early 00s, and there was at least as much movement as you describe. We had "gym" class every day (almost every day in high school), which was basically non-stop movement. We also had recess when we were younger, which again, was typically non-stop movement. If you played a sport (which a lot of people did), then there was even more movement.
No arguments here about the testing crap though. :-)
I remember gym class containing not nearly enough movement. Every week was learning some new game and it took half the time each day to explain rules.
I worked in an elementary school a few year ago though and it's gotten worse. About 20 minutes lunch and 20 minutes recess, which was often canceled due to weather. The kids only had gym one week out of every three.
Additionally, obese, impeded or just untalented kids get mercilessly attacked by the other kids. The only ones to shine are the guys who go on soccer or basketball practice, and they're usually the guys going after "weaker" kids in the first place (which is easy when you got some muscle).
Usually it is one teacher responsible for the entire group of kids, which means that the teacher is busy the whole time explaining stuff to kids which means that inappropriate behavior gets unnoticed way too often.
Organized school sports/gym classes like the ones I had are beyond evil and next to useless, speaking out of more than enough experience.
I agree...at least in the US you have the option to pull your kids out of school and (theoretically) homeschool them. In Germany, if you tried that, you end up in prison and your kids in foster care. There the control over them by the state is complete. I grew up in Austria. We went to school also on Saturdays for a few hours - however the rest of the week we came home at 2pm. The rest of the day was spent outside, playing with others, roaming through forests, completely unsupervised (late 80s, early 90s). I cannot imagine seeing my kids forced to a desk the entire day with what little free time is left over spent in a highly addictive computer game. But as an adult, in a society that considers the new norm 'normal', it's not easy to give your kids more freedom.
On the other hand, forced public schools provide three very important advantages:
1) kids don't fall into religious sect schools as easily as in the US, e.g. the Amish - thereby the state ensures that kids have an experience outside a tightly controlled environment, as well as exposure to stuff like sex ed (which is apparently neither compulsory nor scientifically accurate in some US places).
2) it protects children from abuse going unnoticed (again, religious sects come to my mind, but also "ordinary" home abuse). Simply said, if a teacher notices that a student comes to class every other day looking badly beaten or complains being sexually abused at home, the teacher can inform police. In a homeschooling environment, this protection cannot be provided at all, because parents can literally prevent anybody else from ever seeing the kid.
3) it ensures at least some form of quality of teaching. In Germany there are some exceptions to the mandatory public school system, and these have been fraught with scandals ranging from fake degrees of the teachers to outright corporeal punishments of pupils instead of providing an alternative to public schools (and mostly been shut down).
That said, our public school system is not perfect either - it's not inclusive to students with disabilities, the curriculums are biased towards economical, not societal, needs, it does not provide students with adequate time, place and resources for actual free play, and it selects pupils into the three different high-school tracks way too early. But it's way better than the alternative, whose downsides appear regularly in HN submissions and comments.
School is a training and proving ground for the stress you'll encounter in the workforce. The signal embedded in academic success is "this person was a given a shit ton of difficult work to do under a tight deadline and was successful, many times." That's why (some) employers care about it.
I think we'd do children a great disservice by jerking their worlds from "trivial mode" to "impossible mode" at 3:01pm on the last day of high school. Easing into it is a reasonable idea.
Of course, it'd be nice if we didn't have to face extreme competition for the opportunity to put in long hours on stressful workloads in order to provide for ourselves, but that's the larger economic system more than the schools.
> School is a training and proving ground for the stress you'll encounter in the workforce. The signal embedded in academic success is "this person was a given a shit ton of difficult work to do under a tight deadline and was successful, many times." That's why (some) employers care about it.
I agree with you, but once again this is treating the symptoms of a fundamentally broken society, in this case by abusing children. Not acceptable at all IMO.
You had been downvoted into the grey, I suppose you should watch your language, this being about school and all, because actually that sentiment of disregard [1] seems to have resonated well and is exactly what I expected to come to conclude before even reading the piece. It's just ironic you would misbehave [3] like that in context of schooling, letting politeness and courtesy common to and required for HN discussions slip like that.
1: I mean appeal to empathy[2] and subsequent opposition to sanctions is so ironic, I am lost for words.
2: I mean the call to action in face of neglect.
3: "screaming" in all-caps, implied curses, exaggeration.
Can we please stop promoting this stupid meme that education is entirely about controlling people and making them docile? It's not. It's about education.
The idea that children 'do homework until midnight' is similarly stupid.
It's education when at the end of school the students have comprehensive education. Right now curriculums are skewed waaaay too far in the direction of "only what the economy will need", but stuff like basic life skills - e.g. cooking (only taught in the lowest-grade school track in Germany), basic house maintenance (how to operate a power drill, what wall plugs to use for which wall type, how to unclog a sewer, how to properly secure and wire lighting fixtures), doing a tax return or the core concepts on how to start a company, or what insurances exist only to rip you off ("vet insurance" comes to my mind out of own experience, most do not cover operations which can get really expensive really fast) - falls down.
> The idea that children 'do homework until midnight' is similarly stupid.
It's not an "idea", it's reality, and a nightmare. Especially when additional tutoring before tests is involved. Then it's learning even over the weekends. (source: know a tutor, and she could likely tell you more horror stories than I could submit here in a lifetime)
>It's education when at the end of school the students have comprehensive education.
And then you go on to list a bunch of things that have absolutely nothing to do with education. Cooking, house maintenance, etc. are (and should be) taught by your parents. Nobody needs to 'do a tax return' unless they actually start a company, and it's not exactly difficult. The vast majority of people will never file a tax return, why would they? That's what PAYE is for.
Starting a company? Again, this is something that is very easy. You do not need to have a high school course on how to start a company. It's a very easy thing to do, and completely and utterly irrelevant to the 99% of people that will never start a company.
>It's not an "idea", it's reality, and a nightmare. Especially when additional tutoring before tests is involved. Then it's learning even over the weekends. (source: know a tutor, and she could likely tell you more horror stories than I could submit here in a lifetime)
No, it isn't. Stop assuming that everywhere in the world is California.
> Cooking, house maintenance, etc. are (and should be) taught by your parents
lol, how are parents supposed to do this when they're either both working two jobs to make rent, or actually too incompetent? Kids shouldn't suffer for their parents being stupid.
> Nobody needs to 'do a tax return' unless they actually start a company, and it's not exactly difficult.
In Germany it's next to mandatory to make a tax return, at least you can save really huge amounts of money by doing so. Once again the failure of schools to teach this primarily hits kids with incompetent parents.
> You do not need to have a high school course on how to start a company. It's a very easy thing to do
It's not, and the only thing that's easy is to mess up and land yourself into mountains of debt.
> No, it isn't. Stop assuming that everywhere in the world is California.
I'm German. And you should stop assuming that parents are competent enough (and especially, have the time!) to teach their kids everything that the hypermodernized world requires.
It states right there that schools should be mandatory and mandatory teach about the UN. And in another section of the document it says rights are "universal" to people that aren't against UN interests.
Many countries happily follow these "guidelines" in the school sense... how is that education?
From my personal experience school was just a indoctrination tool, to make people subservient to state, employers and the UN. All useful stuff I learned, even decent basic maths and language was learned outside school (example: my parents taught me maths, my grandmother taught me how to read and write, I learned English, Lua, C, etc... on my own, learned physics and chemistry by reading books)
> example: my parents taught me maths, my grandmother taught me how to read and write, I learned English, Lua, C, etc... on my own, learned physics and chemistry by reading books
Which proves only one point: that you had the advantage of an extremely interested, caring and knowledgeable family.
Many people, especially PoC and "poor people", do not have this advantage (be it because parents or other family are locked up in jails, or because parents have to both work two jobs in order to make rent) - public schools are the only education resource for kids in these families. We as a society must not let them down or we will face the harsh consequences in the future.
Right. Public school is just some worldwide conspiracy. I'm sure the Trilateral Commission had something to do with it. By all means abolish them. It would certainly drastically reduce my property taxes. </s>
Education should be mandatory, and should teach about the UN just as they should teach about all recent 20th century history. The UN is very important to the state the world is in.
>From my personal experience school was just a indoctrination tool, to make people subservient to state, employers and the UN. All useful stuff I learned, even decent basic maths and language was learned outside school (example: my parents taught me maths, my grandmother taught me how to read and write, I learned English, Lua, C, etc... on my own, learned physics and chemistry by reading books)
That's because you have convinced yourself that it's all just indoctrination, man.
> The idea that children 'do homework until midnight' is similarly stupid.
It's not an idea. It's commonplace fact (at least in the US). When I was in school, it was very commonplace for teachers to assign an absurd amount of busy-work to take home, and for kids to have several extracurricular activities immediately after school.
The average schedule for a student at my high school consisted of a 7 hour block (including 30min-1hour lunch), then 2-3 hours of whatever sport (or other organized activity) they were a part of, then (if they actually did it) 2-4 hours of homework.
It may be about education, but the totalitarian system that has been created is very controlling, and very stressful.
I made no such assertion, in fact, I explicitly mentioned that my anecdotal experience was in the US, and nowhere else, just to clarify that fact.
You are continuing under the assumption that I am taking about any education system outside of the US. Even so, looking through the comments here, I see very similar sentiment from someone in Germany, so it seems likely to me that we are not alone.
If I take some bricks, put sauce and cheese on them and call them pizza, they're still not pizza.
State education is similar: it's called education, and it has some teaching moments, but it's still not about education.
The idea that some children do homework until midnight is fact. The idea that all children do was not suggested anywhere here.
The idea that children should do homework until midnight is stupid, and instances quite arguably a bug report against the educational system in question. No one has asserted that that is all systems.
Elementary school has recess
Middle/high school has PE
High school / college has I'll get up when I want and stretch, thank you.
Personally, I vibrate my leg a lot and get up and stretch every hour or two.
Some people make fun when I Pace, but it helps.
Waldorf schools have some good ideas but they come with a lot of wacky Steinerism like Anthroposophy which they swear up and down they don't push on the kids.
All the other teachers are not so lucky. One of the reasons that a typical classroom has desks in rows is because that's all the school provides. Most teachers at my school would love actual tables to group kids at. Tables are so much more flexible; you can have stations, group discussions, combine them for a round table discussion, etc. Kids and teachers can move around to the different tables much more easily than desks in rows.
Your average school desk is also just a POS. They are too small for most HS students (and not just because "The Yanks are fat" you rude foreigner :P ). They are lousy build quality. They are too low to the ground. ADA height tables are actually taller than student desks. This also kills teachers' backs when we have to bend over the check student work.
I would love if we had standing tables but they are expensive (especially for "school grade" tables) and schools would rather spend money every year replacing crappy desks and buying smart boards.
Edit: Also as teachers we are told to be "more engaging" but then when administrators do walk throughs and observations we get docked for having the kiddos moving around the classroom and talking because some of the admin are not used to anything other than teachers lecturing to a quiet, obedient classroom.