Our school board is entrenched in a stalemate over how to balance our district's budget. One way of referring to laying off teachers is instead to talk about "increasing class sizes." For example, our district has calculated that increasing class sizes "by one student" would equate to 35.5 teaching positions. (This, to be clear, is merely one line item on a longer list of measures that result in 120 teaching positions lost in total.)
I had an interesting experience the other day in a 1st grade classroom. I was there just to observe. (Part of the duty of a principal is to be present in classrooms enough to be able to provide constructive feedback to teachers on instructional improvement.) Part of observing is to also interact with students to make sure that they are understanding the purpose of a lesson, and so I started speaking with one particular boy who was mostly off-task. Because this student was so distractible, I ended up parking myself right next to him for the duration of my "observation," trying to keep him on task. In education parlance, the student was experiencing a "1:1 teacher student ratio." And yet I found it impossible to keep him completely focused for the 15 minutes that I was present.
Teaching is a difficult job that can't be described in terms of simple ratios. If I, devoting 100% of my attention, struggled to keep one boy focused for just 15 minutes, then one can imagine the challenge that this particular 1st grade teacher faces on a day to day basis. (And oh, incidentally, there are two other boys in her class that are just as challenging as the one I was working with.) When I become an administrator, it will be essential for me to forever keep this reality fresh in my mind, lest I waltz into a classroom like a consultant and brazenly start dishing out observations and advice to teachers on how they can do their job better.
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