The common room is gone. Worse than gone actually, it is divided in half by a removable gray wall. Algebra is on one side and Geometry is on the other. Far be it from me to deny new teachers their classrooms, but I miss the common room.

Sure students spilled out into the hall during morning meeting, a problem we won’t have in the new gym. Maybe emerald green was an odd color choice for the walls, and maybe half the chairs were broken half the time, but it was a place for the student body to gather. It was before class, it was morning meeting, it was lunch. Seniors presented their exhibitions there, sometimes so did the underclassmen. I remember presenting an exhibition in the common room for the first time last June. It’s funny to think that I’ll never present an exhibition in there again.

When shivering in the rain during an outdoor morning meeting it’s hard not to look longingly at the common room windows, but the windows are blocked off now, divided (as the room itself) by makeshift curtains. My sad glances are met only by leafy greens, and the mocking eyes of iguanas and other colorful lizards; lizards that laugh at the wet hair and goose bumps of the student body. Those cloth reptiles that mock our sore voices and our megaphones.

Then upon entering either of the new classrooms there is the wall. The big gray carpeted wall. Algebra on one side, geometry on the other, student body forced out into the courtyard. As I said, I understand the space dilemma; the need for the extra classrooms, but for me all that can be learned in those classrooms is a lesson in nostalgia, and the wall will always serve as a reminder of things come and gone, a gray blocker on the past. It’s sad, perhaps a tragedy, and I only hope that one day the wall will be torn down (or more accurately peeled away), and the common room will be whole again.