#180: Another “Workable” Solution

It turns out that the brave colleague
who volunteered to teach five preparations
in order to relieve another colleague of a student
load of 217 did not, after all, have to take on
five preparations. Instead, two of her small
classes were swapped straight across
with two of the other teacher’s giant classes.
These moves in the schedule
gave both teachers a new preparation
on the last teacher work day before
students arrived on campus and
decreased the student load of the teacher
burdened with 217 all the way down to
something like 197! –but only if this teacher
agreed to take on a third preparation up from
the two he started with. And when students
started shifting, as they are wont to do
at the beginning of a school year,
students continued to be added to his
197, bringing his student load back above
the 200 student mark again.

I don’t understand the math.
I don’t have a head for this thing they call
the master schedule. I’m glad to see a teacher’s
load reduced, but I wonder how much better
the number 200 plus is from the number 217.
It’s 17 plus or minus better, sure, but is it any more possible
to teach 200 plus or minus kids to write than it is 217?
And I’m curious about how my other
colleague will do with a large class of kids
who are already extremely disadvantaged
like most of the particular kids taking this
particular course for which she swapped out
her freshmen.

And I think about my own situation,
considerably more humane, but it’s like
splitting hairs in the end. I faced today
a group of 36 students on the first day of
a college credit course called Writing 121.
I faced another group of 36 10th graders
and gave them watercolors. My total number
of students clocks in at about 174 kids.
4 of my 6 classes award college credit.
For all of my classes I must and am sincerely
willing to heed the clarion call of equity and
rigor for all, high expectations and all that.
But there is a disconnect as
wide as the Pacific and as deep as the
Atlantic, an embarrassing little hiccup
in the system between what we purpose to do,
what we are charged to do, and what is actually
possible in a world where a single teacher
is asked to effectively teach (and know well)
anywhere from 174 to 217 teenagers at one time.