9 Comments

Many moons ago I subbed in large classes. One was a bilingual class that had 60 students. They sat at long tables shoulder to shoulder. They had two teachers until one went on a maternity leave. The second teacher was never replaced. The one teacher had good glass room management and the children respected him. When I subbed only two were removed. You could never see the end of the line! The class was made smaller the final year. But it was still large.

My children were in first grade classes of 34-36 and packed into small rooms. I also taught large early childhood classes. It’s time to make class sizes smaller! Leonie Haimson has been working on this for years. Please sign the petition.

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Leonie is a force of nature, and it was her petition that inspired this piece. I've been facing oversized classes all my career, and this year has been no exception. I've taught classes as high as 50, mostly when I taught music survey, but once when I was teaching English.

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Large classes are so much harder today in NYC. So many classrooms don’t have the assistance of parts and it’s difficult to give every child the attention he/she needs.

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Absolutely.

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*paras

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Wow! If you worked in a building you would know that chapter leaders have been working with administrators and their SLT committees to ensure that we have a plan to ensure we are going to be closer to closing the gap on class size. If you knew anything about when this law was implemented they stated it would be a “FIVE YEAR” roll out. I don’t know what planet you live on that you think you can wave a magic wand and “POOF” everything is as it should be. Retirement must not be so exciting since you seem to complain about everything and anything and make unrealistic demands. Class sizes have been reducing and it’s happening gradually the way it was meant to happen. You also need to remember everyone is entitled to a free and public education which is a constitutional right for any child. You’re really exhausting sometimes. I’m sorry to say!

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You may want to take that up with Leonie Haimson, the class size expert who wrote the petition.

That said, you may be surprised to learn that personal insults do not constitute argument. As a matter of fact I do work in a school, albeit three days a week. Class sizes in our school have not been reduced at all, and there is no sign they ever will. I said nothing about magic wands, and you've failed to address anything I wrote.

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Have you solutions? And your suggestion: “…everyone in entitled to a free…education…” was not at issue. What Unity appears to use is ad hominems (insults) and entitlement stances to continue abuse of school children by “…a plan to ensure that we will be closer…”. As glaciers?

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Thanks Dana.

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