Boy Girl Boy Girl
I wish it was as simple as that. The alternating gender seating arrangement probably dates back to the earliest days of coeducational primary schools. It exploits the developmental tendency of young children to prefer playmates and conversation partners of their own gender and, frequently, to be repelled to some degree by children of the other gender. Separate Dina from Denise, and put Dina next to Dean and Denise next to Dennis, and you break up two sources of classroom disruption. Standardize the arrangement across the classroom, and when it's time for students to listen to the teacher, there should be no auditory distractions at all. In an ideal social matrix, with all boys alike and all girls alike, all problems of classroom management could be solved by this simple tool. But as I implied in the opening sentence, it's not that simple, for a lot of reasons. First and foremost, the same-gender preference of children is a tendency, not a given. At every age, t...