A new school year starts in a few weeks, July 1 at my "year around" school. Some of my colleagues will be looking for work, and others like myself, starting a new year with potentially monstrous increases in class size. I currently have 5 classes averaging 27 students. With budget cuts classes will be "normed" at 42. At forty-one, it would be a 50% increase in class size. Never mind I only have 36 desks in my room. What is it like teaching five classes of forty-one 9th graders? Picture paper training 10 puppies while doing your taxes, on an iPhone, in heavy traffic.
I told my wife yesterday if my class sizes average 40 it will change the way I teach, and not in a good way. Far fewer days will be spent in class discussion and far few assignments with short answers or short essays. It will mean more tests with feedback existing only of a red number correct on their "scantron" form.
This budget crisis insures even more children will be left behind-- and this in a district, like most urban districts across America, already has a 30-40% + dropout rate.
It almost makes you wish we could go back in time, to the late 90's where we could have regulated and watched the mortgage industry, and fund managers a lot more closely. And perhaps we didn't need to spend a trillion dollars looking for non existant weapons of mass destruction and the cost of subsequent wars. With the savings of all that squandered money maybe there would be more now to support children at this critical time in their lives. But it's okay, we can always float a bond to build more prisons.
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