namespaces and schemas

Dear PG-users,

while praparing a database teaching class with PG 7.1, I have some trouble
setting up a working multi user environment.

My problem is that when some user does a "CREATE TABLE", this table is
created in the *global* namespace, not in the private user schema as I
would have expected.

This means that only the first user can create a table with a given name;
all other users are blocked from using this name in the future.

Question:

   Is it possible to assign different users different namespaces?

My current impressions:

 - SCHEMA seems to be on the TODO list for PG 7.3.
   Thus this problem might be solved next (?) year.

 - With PG 7.1 or 7.2 the only way I see is to use a separate database
   for each user. As we have about 50 groups in the course, this might
   cause some trouble elsewhere.
   Is there another workaround?

Christoph Dalitz