East Prepares for Increased Class Sizes Next Year

“It’s dismal.”

This is English teacher Debe Bramley’s prognosis for her workload next year due to this year’s drastic budget cuts. At least nine teachers from East are being reassigned throughout the district, and some may still be in danger of losing their jobs. This means that next year, students will be spread over a selection of fewer teachers, with core classes containing numbers as high as 35 to 40 students, according to principal Karl Krawitz. This will be a serious problem, with teachers already having to cut down lessons because of the restrictions of block scheduling and relatively high class sizes, according to Bramley and math teacher Christopher Burrows.

 

Like most other teachers at East, freshman English teacher Debe Bramley has five classes with an average of 25 students per class. She spends around three hours of her own time before and after school grading papers and planning the next day’s lesson. When grading major projects, however, she figures that she can grade about four projects an hour. With approximately 125 students, it would take Bramley about 31 hours and 15 minutes to finish grading just one of the ten projects she assigns each year. (see sidebar)

And she hates to consider what her work load will be like next year, when it’s predicted that at least 50 new students will be added in to that equation.

Bramley feels that the English department will be affected the most by this decision, since this department focuses its grading specifically on papers and projects, not quick and easy Scantron tests. She also feels that it is already hard to cover all the material with 25 students.

“It used to be that each English teacher could only have a maximum of 120 students because of the intensity of the workload, but that rule’s been pushed by the wayside with the recent budget cuts,” Bramley said. “There used to be a lot more papers assigned across the board, but with block schedules cutting out teaching time I think most teachers have just stuck to Scantrons.”

Keeping control of a class of such large numbers is also a potential problem facing the teachers. Bramley feels that because of this, group work may be nearly impossible to accomplish.

Geometry, Algebra and Pre-Calculus teacher Burrows’ biggest concern is that there will be less time for each student to ask questions during class and before and after school. This problem would especially pertain to Burrows, since at least twenty students clamor around his desk every morning with questions regarding the previous day’s lesson.

A collective concern coming from Bramley, Burrows and Stallard is where to put additional desks to accommodate the new number of students. Bramley’s room is presently bursting with 30 student desks, her desk, and a podium. Already teaching while wedged between her podium and the whiteboard, she said that it would be almost like a puzzle to fit another row of desks into the cramped room.

One of the biggest problems with these new class sizes, according to Spanish teacher Linda Sieck, is that it’s harder to participate in class, participation being one of the key grading points and teaching strategies for foreign language classes. She also fears losing personal connections with her students, which is one of the fundamental reasons she became a teacher.

“Anytime your class is larger you can’t interact with individual students,” Sieck said. “The more voices there are, the harder it is to be heard.”

Bramley agrees, wanting to maintain her relationships with the students individually and her class as a whole.
“Your class is like your family, and in a big family, someone is going to get left out,” Bramley said. “I worry more about that than the workload.”