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What the Budget Cuts Mean
Sep. 1st, 2010 12:07 amSchool budgets have been slashed. The federal government voted to give schools a bunch of money to help out, but most school boards have elected to bank the money rather than use it. Why? Because budgets have been cut mid-year every year for the last four years. Rather than hire more teachers and other staff (which the money was intended for), schools are holding onto to against future budget cuts.
At Wherever Schools, staffing is slashed to the bone. The contract says we can't have more than 35 students per class, except gym, which is allowed 50, believe it or not.
All my classes but one have 35 students in them. The "little" class has 26 students. I have 166 students this year. That number stuns me. It'll have a major impact on my teaching. I'll be giving a lot less homework. I'll be giving more multiple-choice tests. I simply can't grade 166 essay tests in any meaningful way.
This grates on me. I loathe multiple choice tests in English class. I feel they have no place in an English class. But if I give an essay test to my two English 12 classes, I'll have 70 essays to grade instead of, say, 40 or 50. It takes me between five and eight minutes to properly grade a full-blown essay, so grading a single set of them is a six-hour endeavor.
Now add in all the other homework--story summaries, worksheets, journals, projects. Oh, man!
I also can't teach as much. Keeping order in and just handling a class of 35 students is difficult at best. Whenever I have a large class and a small class of the same thing, the small class invariably finishes the lesson more quickly. Why? I don't have to stop as often to quiet kids down. I don't have as many questions to answer. I don't have to hand out and collect as many papers. If I have an assignment that requires me to talk to each student, however briefly, the smaller class takes less time to do it.
And while we're on the subject, how much one-on-one, personal interaction do you think I can give 166 students? In one class with 35 students, I have 60 minutes of time total. If I did nothing but interact with students individually, that's 1.7 minutes per kid. But of course, most students don't even get that much. If we do a grammar exercise in class, I only interact with the students who are having trouble, and in a large class, I won't even get to all of them.
Their education suffers, but there isn't much I can do. There's only one of me and 35 of them, and I have to teach them all.
At Wherever Schools, staffing is slashed to the bone. The contract says we can't have more than 35 students per class, except gym, which is allowed 50, believe it or not.
All my classes but one have 35 students in them. The "little" class has 26 students. I have 166 students this year. That number stuns me. It'll have a major impact on my teaching. I'll be giving a lot less homework. I'll be giving more multiple-choice tests. I simply can't grade 166 essay tests in any meaningful way.
This grates on me. I loathe multiple choice tests in English class. I feel they have no place in an English class. But if I give an essay test to my two English 12 classes, I'll have 70 essays to grade instead of, say, 40 or 50. It takes me between five and eight minutes to properly grade a full-blown essay, so grading a single set of them is a six-hour endeavor.
Now add in all the other homework--story summaries, worksheets, journals, projects. Oh, man!
I also can't teach as much. Keeping order in and just handling a class of 35 students is difficult at best. Whenever I have a large class and a small class of the same thing, the small class invariably finishes the lesson more quickly. Why? I don't have to stop as often to quiet kids down. I don't have as many questions to answer. I don't have to hand out and collect as many papers. If I have an assignment that requires me to talk to each student, however briefly, the smaller class takes less time to do it.
And while we're on the subject, how much one-on-one, personal interaction do you think I can give 166 students? In one class with 35 students, I have 60 minutes of time total. If I did nothing but interact with students individually, that's 1.7 minutes per kid. But of course, most students don't even get that much. If we do a grammar exercise in class, I only interact with the students who are having trouble, and in a large class, I won't even get to all of them.
Their education suffers, but there isn't much I can do. There's only one of me and 35 of them, and I have to teach them all.
