Class Size Doesn't Matter (Said No Teacher Ever) - Entrepreneur Generations

This year, I teach just under 160 students.

Each of my five classes has 30 students or over. My largest class has 34.

This is not unusual for my school, nor for teachers in the Baltimore City Public Schools. Class sizes and class loads are high around the system.

Lots of research supports the fact that class size affects student achievement, a lot. And, in my 15 years as a teacher, I definitely agree. The difference between a class of 24 (for me, the ideal size for teaching) and 34, or 32, or even 30, is pretty huge. It's the difference between a crowd and a group; it's the difference between being able to have 2-minute writing conferences with students to having 1-minute ones. There's a point in a load of students where it feels like you can really check in with each student every day in a meaningful manner, and that point is less than 30 in a 45-minute period.

However, while class size is discussed a lot in the realm of teaching, but, sometimes, I think that conversation is too short-sighted. The work of a teacher in those 45 minutes of a class period are definitely important, but it's the time outside of those 45 minutes that takes just as much thought and energy. I've spent much of this Saturday night grading 9th grade essays, and I still have quite a bit to do. My seniors' work is piling up, and even the Drama class has an entire summative assessment (their responses to this play) on the docket to grade. I literally have hundreds of pieces of paper in my world right now that I have to either score or offer feedback on, and this will get even worse at the end of the quarter as the month closes.

There's more to it than that, of course. Each day, 160 human beings come through my world for whom I am responsible and about whom I care. As I get to know them more and more, I'm placing them all on informal individualized learning plans about how I can make them better writers, better readers, better discussers, and better actors. And, believe me, I'm not complaining: these connections with students and helping them reach their goals and get better at reading and writing is something I love to do; it's my life's work. But it's a lot harder with 160 kids every day -- the biggest daily load of my career -- than 140 kids. Or 120. Or 75, which was my student load my first two years of teaching.

At around this time last year, I was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, a cardiomyopathy (weakness of the heart muscle, caused by a virus) that pretty much makes me exhausted all the time as my heart struggles to pump blood around my body. After several scary months, I thought I was on the mend as the summer came to a close, with my heart's Ejection Fraction improving and, in general, just feeling better. Six weeks into the school year, though, and I feel like I've devolved; my friends and colleagues are asking why I'm short of breath all of the time, and I'm pretty much more tired than I've ever been. I finally reached out to my cardiologist on Friday, and she wants me to run through another echocardiogram in the next two weeks. I'm crossing my fingers that I'm only, in my cardiologist's word, "deconditioned."

But I can't shake the feeling that I feel like I'm working so hard that my health is failing, because, indeed, I feel like I'm being ground down into a nub. I got a reflexology massage through Groupon the other day, and my tough-talking Eastern European reflexologist expressed surprise that, as a "young man" my body sure was racked with tension and stiffness, to the point where she couldn't even do anything with my torso, instead focusing all her energy on my pressure points on my head, ears, and feet. Although I'm exercising 4 times a week and watching what I eat, I haven't lost weight and haven't felt good and healthy since the school year started.  I don't know if it really is, but I do know that it's October and the school year has been more of a challenge than I remember previous years being during this time.

I make a nice salary for the Baltimore City Public Schools. Several of my colleagues do too. I wonder, though, if better teacher incentives would be better working conditions: a guarantee of lower class sizes (never more than 25 students in a class) and class loads (never more than 100 to a teacher).  I wonder if class size and load guarantee would have been a better investment to BCPSS and our students than our contract?

Until our nation, and our school systems, get serious about class sizes and class loads, I do believe that many educational reforms will be mostly window dressing.

from Epiphany in Baltimore http://ift.tt/1FYmrhs Class Size Doesn't Matter (Said No Teacher Ever) - Entrepreneur Generations

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