Narrow classrooms and existential/disappearing art galleries

The B112 Art Gallery that is no more

     Today at IVC, after my morning Phil 1 class, I decided to head home, but then I thought, hey, why not visit the Art Gallery in Building B100? (B112)

     SOME BACKGROUND. Recently, the Mold Monster was found lurking under that shitty temporary building that houses the bookstore in the parking lot. Apparently, if you find a Mold Monster under your building, you’ve just gotta move out and there’s no two ways about it.
     The discovery, occurring I guess right at the start of the Fall semester, inspired administration to kick a bunch of ESL courses out of their B100 rooms (they were relocated to those shitty old CEC temps) to give the bookstore a safe new home. Moving the bookstore into B100 was already in the Master Plan, but this alleged emergency moved things up a few years. (Who knows why things really happen at IVC. Nobody ever explains anything.)

     THE ART GALLERY AS VULNERABLE. Now, right from the start, some of our readers have grumpily speculated that the Art Gallery (B112), which has long been located just to the right of the B100 entrance, would also be a casualty of this latest and dubious round of facilities musical chairs. In fact, I was told by somebody who ought to know that, yep, the Art Gallery would be affected by this Mold Monster thing; it would be moved to SSC the PAC foyer.
     So, like I said, I headed over to B100 to visit the Art Gallery. I passed by that snazzy rusty humanoid sculpture out in the grass just outside the building and then headed straight to the room.
     Something didn’t seem right. I couldn’t tell what. I grabbed the door handle and, to my surprise, the door opened.

* * *

     WHAT!? NO ART GALLERY!? RG always refers to the “existential” Art Gallery. That’s because it’s virtually never open (it has weird hours, man), and when it IS open, it’s as empty as a barn.
     She’s right. You’d walk in there and there’d be a little gal sitting at the corner desk, alone, in vaguely bizarre echoey silence. There’d be some stuff on the walls I guess.
     Soon, you’d wanna escape to the sun and grass outside.
     So, anyway, I opened the door and, to my surprise, I cast my eyes upon, not an Existential Art Gallery, but a classroom. Huh?
     That’s right. There is no Art Gallery in B112. I’m sure it was there, but it ain’t there now. The room that once housed the gallery is now a classroom, and a weird one, cuz it’s seriously narrow. I kept thinking, how would you teach in here? You’d stand at one end, and the kids at the other end would yell, “we can’t hear you down here.” So you’d walk down to the other end, and then the other kids would yell, “we can’t hear you down here.” So you’d walk back. And so on.

Rust Man guarding the
Art Gallery that Is Not

     PERIPATETIC FACULTY. I walked all the way down that long room and found another door, this one opening to B100’s central hallway. I walked through it.
     Once in the hallway, I ran into a colleague who used to teach her ESL classes in rooms B101 or 102. She didn’t say so, but she obviously wasn’t too happy about the move. (Later, I spoke with RG, and she told me that some of these CEC boxes didn’t even have chairs in ‘em! I think the chairs arrived, like, yesterday.)
     She showed me what’s become of the first three rooms (on the left) as you enter B100. The doors to those rooms were locked, but we could see through the little door windows. The walls are gone, and now there’s just this huge empty room, awaiting shelving and cheap pens and textbooks.
     This big space is perfect for the bookstore, I guess.
     “Wow,” I said. "It's big."
     “I showed up to teach my class here, and they said I couldn’t go in,” she said. She looked right at me.
     I took her outside to show her the room that used to be the Art Gallery. She slowly walked inside and muttered, “How would you teach in here?”
     “I dunno,” I said.