The unusual layout allows for the creation of some classrooms flooded with light from windows on three sides.
As a teaching tool, the series has much to recommend it, especially the way it emphasizes how one historical development influences another, a cause and effect often missed in the dry dates-and-places method of some classrooms.
He engaged, instead, in his own tour, to a school on Staten Island where a possible PCB leak from light fixtures forced the closing of some classrooms, and a school in Brooklyn trying to find money to hire a math coach.
The school, they asserted, would drain public classrooms of some of the smartest students while saddling neighbors with another outgrowth of the campus.
The 70-year-old former headteacher, whose reputation was forged in the classrooms of some of the most challenging schools in the country, and who nicknamed himself Dirty Harry after the Clint Eastwood character, has been a colourful figure in the education world, unafraid to upset pupils, parents, teachers and government ministers.
Today, he is a soldier in a different battle: The effort to bring both girls and boys into the classrooms of what some are calling the 'new Sudan', after the signing of historic peace accords between the Government and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement.
That just about describes classrooms of 25 years ago.
Han talks of classrooms of sleeping Chinese students.
By 2002 there were eight classrooms of children.
But in the classrooms of Middlesbrough, dolls are positively encouraged.
