High school is the time in your life when you’re supposed to be finding yourself – who and how you want to be as you get older. In order to do that, teens need a support system. That starts with the people who teach them five days a week, 180 days a year.
If you aren’t fortunate enough to have the money for a private school education, then you have to take what you can get from public schools, and it’s not enough. We don’t get a personalized experience, because the students in each of these schools have their own needs. We have our own problems, our own families, our own opinions, and our own talents. Some of us are lucky enough to have a small class.
But when class sizes are unreasonable, no one benefits.
Granted, how in the world is a public, understaffed, and overworked school supposed to help lead us to success? I’m not blaming the schools or the principals or the teachers. They don’t get enough funding to keep everything they wish they could afloat, not to mention the shortage of teachers in America, but I wonder why?
Schools need more one-on-one experiences. They need to have the opportunity to interact with educators in a format that allows for more help, and that can only happen when there are not 30 students in classes. But that isn’t happening for the large majority of kids.
Not only is there more help available in a small class, there is more of a connection to the teacher. That makes students feel more comfortable, and when that happens, students are more likely to ask for help or share things that are going on in their lives. This kind of relationship creates trust, this way you are more willing to learn and more likely to ask questions.
As a result, the outcome is a student who is willing to advocate for themselves and a teacher who can and wants to help.
These big class sizes are also not good for teachers, there are countless papers to grade, behaviors to manage, and lots of accommodations to make. This is an impossible task.
It’s like being in a traffic jam; you are stuck in a position you didn’t ask to be in, you have a destination to get to, but you’re unable to get there – helpless – because of no fault of your own, AND you have no other choices because there are so many obstacles around you that are preventing you from changing lanes.
For the students, we are stuck in the backseat with no control, feeling helpless without the guidance we need to be successful and eventually being unequipped to advocate for ourselves.
What are we doing? We can’t keep ignoring this problem because we can’t think of a good enough solution.
So what is that?
Balance out the numbers. Make sure you have enough teachers per student, per subject. Look at schedules, don’t give a teacher 30 kinds one block and then 15 the next. It is doable.
In the end, all students want is a safe place to learn and have a unique high school experience so that we are not set up for failure. That starts with class size, it starts with making sure that kids get the guidance a young mind needs. It starts with learning how and who you want to be.
