The classroom that was too loud

Room 204 had a reputation. Teachers said the students there did not listen. Three different teachers said it, which usually means the problem is the students.

A trainee teacher spent a week measuring instead of guessing. She borrowed a sound meter from the physics department and recorded the noise level in six rooms. Room 204 was eleven decibels louder than the quietest room, and the extra noise came almost entirely from outside: the room faced a busy road and had single windows that did not close properly.

Eleven decibels sounds small. It is not. A difference of ten decibels is heard as roughly twice as loud. Students in that room were being asked to follow a lesson through a wall of traffic noise, and the ones who struggled most were the ones sitting at the back.

The school could not move the road. It did two cheap things instead. It fixed the window catches, which cost very little, and it moved the teacher's usual position from the front corner to the centre of the room, which cost nothing at all.

The reputation faded within a term. Nobody had become a better listener. The room had simply stopped asking them to do something difficult without telling them it was difficult.