No Room for Ninth Grade, So They Used the Bathroom

In the late 1980s the International School of Prague was not a campus. It was a villa in Prague 6, built for one well-off family. The kitchen was the science lab. The library ran along the hallways, so that looking something up meant standing in everyone’s way. About a hundred people, pupils and staff, all knew each other’s names, which is lovely until you have done something wrong.

The school ran from grade one to grade eight. Then six pupils, whose families were staying on in Prague, reached the end of grade eight with nowhere obvious to go, and the school agreed to open a ninth grade for them.

There was one difficulty. There were no rooms. Every space in the villa that could hold a desk already held several.

So the ninth grade went into the attic bathroom.

Not a former bathroom. A bathroom. The bath was still there. The blackboard went in the bath, because the bath was the one place in the room where it would stand up. Six fourteen-year-olds sat round it, on chairs carried up the stairs.

Two former pupils who remembered it did not describe it as a hardship. When the whole school needed to meet, they recalled, it opened the sliding doors between two classrooms and squeezed in, because the villa had no hall. That was simply how the place worked. It was too small for a ninth grade and opened one anyway.

When the year ended, in 1988, the six scattered to schools abroad. It was a hard parting at fourteen.

I spent last spring touring secondary schools in Brussels for the middle one, and I have seen dozens of facilities presented as features. A “learning street”, which was a corridor. A “collaboration pod”, which was a sofa. A “wellbeing garden”, which was a bench beside the bins with a pot of lavender on it.

Not one of them offered a bathroom.

I mentioned the Prague ninth grade to the head of one school, as a joke, while we stood in a gleaming science block. She did not laugh. She said, with real feeling, that she would give anything for six pupils and a bathroom, because her Year 9 had 180 and the toilets had a waiting list.

The middle one, meanwhile, has decided the bathroom is where she does her best homework. She says it is the only room in our flat nobody walks through on the way to somewhere else.

She has a point. I have stopped arguing. The blackboard, so far, is a whiteboard, propped on the side of the bath. It says MATHS. It has said MATHS for three weeks.