Why I Still Look at Photos of My School Building: La Martiniere Boys’ College and the Power of Place in Learning
I found the photos on my phone last week, buried ten folders deep under screenshots of grocery lists and dog videos. The first one was a shot of the main building at La Martiniere Boys’ College, taken from the front lawn. The light was that soft late-afternoon kind that makes red brick look almost orange. I remember I’d stood in that exact spot a hundred times waiting for my father to pick me up, but I don’t think I ever once looked up at the building itself until I was much older.
Now I find myself zooming in on the arched windows, the weathered clock tower, the way the ivy has thickened along the east corner. I’m not a photographer. I took these pictures badly, half tilted, with a finger smudge in the corner of one. But they’ve become something I scroll back to more often than I’d like to admit.
The funny thing is, I didn’t love that building when I was in it. It was too old and too grand to feel like mine. The corridors were enormous, with ceilings that made your voice disappear into the shadows. On humid July mornings, the smell of old wood and damp stone followed you all the way to the classroom. I remember being six years old, sitting cross-legged on the floor during assembly, staring at the peeling paint on the baseboards and wondering if the whole place might just crumble one day. It didn’t feel like a school. It felt like a museum that happened to have desks in it.
But that’s exactly what I’ve come to value about it. Not the grandeur, but the fact that it didn’t try to be anything else. The building was stubbornly, quietly itself. It had been standing for over a century, and it didn’t particularly care whether you liked it or not. And there is something educational about that, in a way we don’t talk about enough.
When I look back at those photos now, I’m not just remembering friendships or exams or the one teacher who always smelled like clove cigarettes. I’m remembering what it felt like to move through a space that was designed before anyone had heard of open concept learning. The primary school wing, for instance, had these enormous windows on the south side. For the first two years, we had our desks pushed against the wall directly beneath them. The sun would hit the wooden tops and warm them by the time we came back from lunch, so there was always this faint, comfortable heat under our forearms during afternoon lessons.
That’s not a pedagogical strategy. It’s just architecture that happens to do something good. But it works. It made me look forward to returning to my seat. It made a room feel less like a classroom and more like a place that was holding me there, gently, while my brain got on with the business of learning fractions.
The thing that strikes me most in the photos is the courtyard. It’s a square of stone and a few scattered trees, surrounded on all sides by tall, dark doors. We weren’t supposed to run there between classes. It was for walking, for gathering in quiet groups, for getting from one subject to the next without disturbing the serious faces of the old building. And we did run there anyway, of course. But even as kids, we understood that the space demanded a particular kind of tone. You could shout in the playground out back. You lowered your voice in the courtyard.
I didn’t think about that as a lesson at the time. I just knew something felt different when I stepped into it. Now, as a parent, I understand what that was about. A space can teach you how to behave long before anyone says a word. The high ceilings and the stone walls and the heavy wooden doors communicated something without ever speaking. They said: this building has been here for a long time. It has held thousands of students before you. You are part of something that isn’t just today.
And children need that. Not every day, not in every room, but somewhere. A sense that the world existed before them and will continue after them is a surprisingly stabilizing thing. It puts their small daily worries into a wider frame without ever saying so directly.
I’ve been thinking about this because my own daughter is now in her third year of primary school, in a brand new building with glass walls and bright blue floors. She likes it. It’s modern, and the classrooms have sliding partitions that fold back to create one giant open space. Her teachers say the design encourages collaboration. I don’t doubt that it works for many kids. But I’ve noticed that when I ask her what her school looks like, she doesn’t say much about the building at all. She talks about the cubby where she keeps her shoes, the corner of the reading rug where she sits, the crack in the window sticker shaped like a llama. The spaces she remembers are the small ones.
I think that’s worth paying attention to. Whether a child learns in a heritage building or a prefab block, the way they form a sense of place in the early years comes down to the details that adults often overlook. A warm patch of sun on a desk, a quiet corner where the noise of the corridor fades, a windowsill that’s exactly the right height for leaning your chin on. These aren’t luxury features. They’re anchors.
So when my daughter mentions school, I try to ask questions that go beyond “How was your day?” I ask her where she sits at lunchtime and whether the heater makes a clicking sound and which part of the classroom she likes best. It sounds small, but it helps her find her own words for what the place means to her. It also tells me whether she’s developing that quiet sense of belonging that I didn’t recognize until I was looking at old photos of my own school.
There’s another thing those photos do. They remind me that the physical environment also holds the emotional texture of a childhood. When I look at the image of the staircase leading to the chemistry labs, I don’t see stone steps. I see myself at thirteen, holding my breath before a practical test, my palms sweating onto the notebook cover. The building recorded all of that and kept it. That’s why the photos feel so alive, even though they’re just static images of arches and roofs.
I know some schools now are moving away from permanent facilities altogether, with parents opting for hybrid learning or micro-schools that rotate between libraries and community halls. I’m not against that. Flexibility has its benefits. But I worry a little about what gets lost when no place holds a child’s memories in its walls. Without a fixed location, there’s no old building to return to in your mind, no courtyard that demands a lower voice, no sun-warmed desk waiting for your forearm after lunch.
None of this is a criticism of modern design. It’s just a reminder that the built environment is part of the curriculum, whether anyone writes it into the lesson plan or not. A school building is never neutral. It’s always teaching something—about history, about care, about how the past is allowed to speak to the present.
These photos of La Martiniere won’t help me improve my daughter’s math scores or solve any of her homework struggles. But they’ve become a useful reference point for me. When I pass school grounds and see children sitting on steps, lingering at gates, pulling leaves off the hedge by the entrance, I know those small moments are doing something real. The building is giving them a place to hold onto.
I don’t know if I’ll look at these photos again next month or leave them buried in the folder where I found them. But this morning, before the school run, I zoomed in on the clock tower one more time. It read 11:47, frozen forever. My daughter came up behind me and asked what I was looking at. I said it was my old school. She studied the dark windows and the ivy for a moment, then asked if the building had a bathroom. I laughed and said yes, of course. She shrugged and walked away to put on her shoes.
That’s probably the right response to an old building: practical, unimpressed, ready for the day ahead. Maybe she’ll see it differently one day, when she’s older, when she’s scrolling through photos of her own school and remembering the warmth of a desk or the quiet of a corner. Or maybe she won’t. Either way, the photos in my phone will stay where they are—frozen at 11:47, waiting for me to look again when I’m ready.
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