Sooner Elementary was where I went to school for kindergarten through 6th grade. It’s a nasty looking building more reminiscent of a prison than a school. It doesn’t help that my memories of the place involve a strong dislike for the authoritarian style of management of the administration and teachers.

The entrance is about as inviting as it gets. Whoever designed it made a half-assed attempt at beautifying it by putting in the two columns and the windows, but that’s the entirety of the interesting features of the building. Everything else is just thick brick walls and steel doors. It’s supposed to be tornado resistant, but it doesn’t even have a basement. In the legendary inexact words of Howard Kunstler, “At some point during the design process, someone threw his hands in the air and said ‘F*** it!'”.

The interior is just as sad as the exterior. The brick walls of the halls are all painted sterile white. Not only is it a bad idea to paint brick in the first place, but they painted it in the worst way possible to somehow make something architecturally dry and boring even more depressing. Teachers, in an attempt to counter this, try to decorate the grade’s halls with their student’s artistic work, but that barely manages to put a band-aid on a gushing wound. All the rooms are completely windowless, so students don’t even get to see the sun except for a half hour at recess.

Being stuck in concrete box for 8 hours would be enough to drive anyone crazy, which is exactly what happened. Students were constantly restless and agitated, and teachers would bite off the head of anyone who dared displease them in some fashion. The most memorable instance was when a 3rd grade teacher was telling off a 2nd grader for holding the door open for a line of students coming in from recess. I think the only reason I maintained my sanity while I was there was because I spent most of my time escaping in to books from the library.

I was glad to be rid of this hideous building once I completed 6th grade. The other schools I went to had some of the same general design flaws, but not nearly to the same degree. It was highly refreshing to go to high school at Norman North where the architects know what a f***ing window is.