Why don’t we want students to interact?

Last semester in one of my classes we focused a lot of our attention on adolescents, specifically how they develop their identities and what our role is as educators in that process. I remember in one of the readings there was a quote that really stuck with me:

Why do we spend inordinate amounts of energy and time doing our best to manage the classroom by preventing students from interacting with one another?

I think it resonated so deeply because earlier that week I had asked myself the same question while observing a high school ESL teacher in two of her classes.

In the first class, the students started out with a “quiz” where they worked in pairs, each with their own color pen. The teacher set up the pairs in advance so that every pair had a “stronger” student that could help the “weaker” one – I though it was very clever and it worked well. Every student felt equally successful and she still got a general idea of where each student was individually based on the pen color.