The year 2001 is predicted to be the peak year for school construction and renovation in the United States with an estimated dollar amount of $27 billion. And while Rome burns, the American National Standards Institute technical committee on classroom acoustics fiddles with its pending standard. In the meantime, in an effort to introduce more school facility planners, architects and contractors to the virtues of good classroom acoustics, the Acoustical Society of America has recently published a 12-page pamphlet titled “Classroom Acoustics,” a resource for creating learning environments with desirable listening conditions.
Written by five college seniors of the Architectural Engineering program at the University of Kansas, the introduction, as well as the rest of the report, is peppered with anecdotal statements designed to impress if not to be entirely accurate. One such introductory statement is that many classrooms have speech intelligibility ratings of 75 percent or less. It is pointed ___ that this is _________ to reading a ____ in which every ______ word has been ________. Possibly an easy task for expert Mad Libs players but not so easy for “young children with limited vocabularies, students with learning disabilities, those with auditory processing problems, and people for whom English is a second language.” (Missing words: out, equivalent, book, fourth, deleted.)