Hearing someone who’s been excelling at their job for 20-some years say that they are overwhelmed with its current demands can be a bit unnerving.
It can be downright unsettling when that person is your child’s teacher, on Back To School night, commenting on the size of her class.
I’m not really sure what to think. Yes, I knew that 24 is a large kindergarten class. But I guess I thought that this woman had seen it all, and would be sailing on through. I still imagine she’s seen it all — but she’s seen it in more manageable chunks.
Without having read any research whatsoever, I had a pretty keen sense that large classes aren’t beneficial to learning. But last night I bopped on over to BubbleWorld where KHE had handily linked to some information about just how detrimental it can be.
The school’s answer to this is to send out a plea in its newsletter home for “more parent volunteers to help in the classroom.” Huh. Well, the nice thing is that we live in a neighborhood where parents actually have time to volunteer, and many do. I will.
But let’s look a little deeper, and do some math, oh, just because. Someone looked at the numbers and said, 71 kindergartners; three sections of 24, 24, and 23, for the kids who are still trying to master how to line up and get to the cafeteria and the potty and sit at a desk, all time-consumptive and energy-intensive crowd management for the teacher. Whew. Or, if a fourth section were added, fairly manageable classes of 18, 18, 18 and 17.
(Except the word is there’s no ROOM available. Not no staff, no ROOM.) But wait — the third grade has three sections this year, which puts their classes at a petite 16, 16, and 17.
Suppose they, those 49 students, presumably fully capable of navigating the cafeteria and general classroom skills, were given two sections of 24 and 25, creating an extra classroom for that fourth kindergarten section?
Total number of overcrowded students in Scenario A: 71. Total in Scenario B: 49. This does not strike me as a particularly complicated algorithm.
So. Why the odd balance?
I wonder if perhaps the answer to that conundrum lies in three short letters: S.O.L.
Not as in Shit Outta Luck, although we could certainly go there, but Standards Of Learning, Virginia’s version of standardized testing. Guess where it kicks in? Yep. 3rd grade. So one has to wonder. Could it be that the attitude from on high, where certainly they understand the ramifications of classroom crowding, is along the lines of Let’s create the best learning environment we can, not for the maximum number of students … but where it OFFICIALLY “counts”?
Not, mind you, that the school is in any remote danger of not earning a passing grade — but apparently they’re pretty attached to having their scores up in the high 90s. They certainly made a big deal about it at Back To School Night.
I’m not impressed.
