It's the Little Things That Make Class Size Important

I've got a load of kids this year. Too many--our contract limit is 22 (sweet!), but we've had to carry 24 this year because of a variety of circumstances. Last year I started with 18, and that was great. This year, here are some of the things that I'm noticing:

*The line stretches on a lot longer than it did last year. Even in pairs, that's three more pairs, about 10 more feet down the hall. You get a couple of knuckleheads at the end of the line and you've got a problem.

*The carpet is packed. I had to rearrange desks after day 1 just to accomodate the space needed to do the calendar time.

*If we do 5 papers in a day (entry task, two reading worksheets, two math worksheets) that's 30 more papers a day to grade/process.

*I did the math on parent conferences and blanched. 24 kids at 30 minutes each is 12 hours of conferences. Trick is that some kids take longer than 30 minutes, so I could realistically see me having 15 hours of conference time That's a lot of talking in two days.

*There's 26 computers in the lab. There's 24 kids. God willing all the computers are working all the time, because if just 3 of them are out of commission I'll have a kid who doesn't have a computer.

*Reading groups go from three groups of six to four groups of six. Or 4 groups of 5 and a group of 4. Either way, that's harder.

I've heard it said before that the correlation between class size and student success is weak. Perhaps, perhaps not. What I do know is that I'm now dividing my attention among 24 kids with different needs instead of 18, but the number of hours in a day hasn't changed. These kids will not get the experience that last year's kids did, and that's a shame.