Amen, I just need IRL adblock now please.
Amen, I just need IRL adblock now please.
It causes genuine harm, I’m visually impaired and I’ve wandered into construction zones because advertising billboards are mounted near and “road work ahead” signs and everything is all just bright and bold.
I don’t know what’s official, everything is competing for my attention but I have very little capacity to dedicate my full attention to a visual sign. The end result is incredibly fatiguing, seeing a bright sign and straining to ensure I read it because it’s colours look important, nope, it’s an ad, that was a waste of energy, oh look another one with the same blurry colours and type setting it’s probably the same ad… Nope that one actually needed my attention, and now I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be and I’m in danger.
I’m also hard of hearing, but fortunately audio adber in the public isn’t as bad, but anyone who’s hearing impaired knows how fatiguing it is to try and filter through noise. It’s the exact same for visual impairment.
These posters are destined for the recycling bin (they’re the old ones from the main classroom) so if anything it might reduce damage to other things if people are defacing the poster instead.
though in saying that, we don’t have a tagging issue at our centre - I’ve rarely had to remove graffiti from toilets, it’s only the soap dispensers that keep getting messed with here, but ripping the posters is also fine, if it makes someone less tempted to rip the soap off the wall.
…those don’t even remotely work to serve all genders.
I still wouldn’t technically be able to pee anywhere if I was a student at that school (other than the single stall room…why not just have a bunch like that?)
I understand it now!
The window looks over the sink area where you would wash your hands after ensuring you are dressed and decent upon leaving the private stall.
The idea is by having the window in the wash area, students will be hyperconscious that this is not a private space, and they will be mindful to move into the truly private stall before starting their private business.
I think it’s purely to avoid the following example;
The number of times I’ve stepped into a public restroom because I needed to fix something privately - my stockings are rolling down, a bandaid on my upper thigh needs replacing, my bra strap is coming loose. These are things that are private but not as private as using the toilet, so often I’ll just fix these things up while I’m at the sink area, I don’t need a stall.
But if someone walks in while I’m fixing my stockings, well they didn’t consent to seeing so much of my upper thigh when they turned the corner, and while I personally don’t care that they saw me, I can see how a teenage girl might be deeply upset if this happened because she absent mindedly forgot that the sink area is not truly private.
Spooky I think it’s to constahtkt remind the students that onky the stalls are truly private.
It’s a misguided, and potentially harmful way to do this though…
The discourse around this is very confusing, especially as a non American who has never been in an American school bathroom.
What you’re describing sounds like a normal public toilet set up in my country
There’s a hallway or doorway into an open space with mirrors sinks and hand dryers, sometimes that hallway has a door to it, but often it’s just an open door frame. Sometimes they’ll put a 90 degree turn in the hall to obscure looking straight in, but not always.
Behind the sinks are private stalls. At more expensive locations they’ll have semiambulant stalls, some will even have their own sink inside the stall so that the full access toilet and wash room can be available to those who can’t ambulate.
(full access toilets and wash rooms are entirely seperate from the sink and stalls)
The sink area is often still segregated by gender at older establishments, but anyone walking past could glimpse in and see /shock fully dressed people washing their hands!
It only just occurred to me that bathroom stalls in the schools almost never have any marketing on them like they do at shopping centres, ours certainly don’t.
Which isn’t weird, (obviously don’t want corporate marketing into schools) but at home you hang stuff in your bathroom when you have kids- map of the world, vexology poster, dinosaur poster, etc, and I’m always trying to find a way to force my students to actually look at the term calendar in advance instead of being suprised that there’s a scheduled assessment today.
I’m replacing the soap in the bathrooms every day, how has it never occurred to me to slap a poster on the back of the door so the students have something to look at, I’ve got so many posters with no wall space too!
Yup, at my highschool by week 5 they’d be swapping all the gender signs on the bathrooms because the girls were wrecking the mirrors and the boys would bust the doors, and they only had the budget to fix each once so they’d rotate who used which bathrooms to even out the type of damage so even though boys were constantly smashing the doors the first door wouldn’t come off the hinge until the end of first term (versus within the first week, which was the damage rate before faculty started the sign swap system).
There was one year where in Term 4 we had a row of porta-pottys because some one’s dad owned a shitter company and that was cheaper than fixing the real bathrooms.
I don’t know why those degenerates were breaking the bathrooms knowing they’d be stuck pissing with the normal door… Why they couldn’t just set fire to the grass behind the woodshop like normal delinquents. Grass grows back for free.
I work at a community education centre now, and the soap dispensers appear to be what everyone likes destroying these days.
We can’t afford to replace them so we currently have bottles of hand soap tied to the taps with string that I replace every other day.
Also I’ve had to put signs up reminding teenagers that poo particles from flushing will land on every surface in a bathroom, so stop kissing the mirrors.
It helps that I work in community ed, there are 5 people on our entire faculty, so we litteraly all do a little bit of every job there is to do at an education centre.
My payslips look hilarious because I get paid 8 different rates per week depending on what I’m actually doing, admin, custodial, teaching, etc.
But this is the style of chaotic yet whole-ass-in education that drives me. I would quickly burn out at a more structured school-based workplace.