A tutor for every child–pipe dream or possibility?
In my February column for GOOD, the website “for people who give a damn,” I discuss the factor that, perhaps more than any other, prevents students from learning in school. Because teachers deal with classes of 15 or 25 children all day, every day, students are deprived of the high-level teaching that can occur during one-on-one interactions. An eye-opening tutoring experience with a former student challenges me to think about how schools can change to take advantage of teachers’ skills and students’ desire to learn. Click here to read the column.
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dream on about class size, budget cuts will have class sizes of 30-40 in my county. 45 teachers are due to be cut.
nepomucena – That doesn’t have to be the case. There are plenty of ways to re-arrange the yearly calendar and daily schedule to prevent this from occurring. For example, why do students need to be in school for 6-7 hours per day, 5 days per week? Couldn’t they keep class sizes the same by instituting study halls–staffed by volunteers from a local college or university and supervised by 1-2 teachers–for a certain portion of time each day? Couldn’t non-core teachers who handle art and gym and computer be cut, with their positions filled by parent volunteers who have expertise in those areas? One reason students bear the burden of teacher layoffs is that most people assume kids need to be in school from 8-3 Monday through Friday, and travel in groups of 20-25 from class to class. There’s no reason that particular model has to be used. If your school system spent the summer building a new model of organization from scratch, I’ll bet they could create a system that would serve students at a similar level of quality as exists now. This seems, unfortunately, like one more example of the world changing (specifically, the economy) while the education community tries to do the same things in the same way they’ve always been done.
In response to another comment. See in context »