Today I was in an English class over at Mt. Pleasant High School. Most of the classes were English 3, so 11th graders. This teacher had huge classes of about 35 students. That is pretty rare from what I’ve experienced. Also, from all the whining that goes on by parents and teachers about “smaller class size” being needed to better educate kids, I thought this was a strange occurance. So I asked the class whether they thought having so many kids in the class was detrimental to their learning or classroom experience. First of all, they admitted to not knowing what detrimental meant, but then those of them who verbalized responses to me said that they liked it. They thought it was more fun and they valued the variety of opinions that is possible with that many students.

I’m sure a lot of it has to do with how much respect an individual teacher commands in her classroom, which this teacher certainly did based on the good behavoir by her classes. They weren’t even honors classes, which tend to be better behaved and more focused in the first place.

It leads me to believe that all the calls for “smaller class size” are full of shit. Especially when in two years these kids will be in college courses with 400 other students at a time at some universities.