I am just a taxpayer, upstate NY, and I always hear at budget time classroom sizes are large...30 to 40 students per class, overcrowded, the district needs to expand and build a new addition.....the number of students in class in the movie, even an "entry level" kind of class like Lowrey's, seemed pretty small or average- what does anyone else think?
shareYes. I think it is mentioned in the commentary or something. Most of the kids were unpaid volunteers during the summer, so it was hard for them to get more than the ones they got.
I was in honors classes in high school, so ours were a tad smaller than normal classes, but even we had 20-30 people.
And yes, they do act like those kids acted. Not in my honors classes, but in any regular classes I had. There were always those kids who would do anything and everything to anger a teacher.
That is why I love college. You disrupt the class, you get kicked out. The professor doesn't have to deal with parents or principals or anything. They get kicked out, they fail, and it all comes around to bite them in the ass, either by financial aid getting dropped because of bad grades, or parents kicking their ass.
Mocking Greenly Productions
I am a substitute and, while most classes hover around the low 20's or so, I've had as many as 30+ and as low as 6. It depends. Most schools, if they can afford it, are leaning towards smaller class sizes. To the first poster, do you think the news reports in your area are lying to milk your sympathies (and more tax dollars)? Or do you think teachers don't have it hard enough to deal with 20 students so they should attempt to teach 30-40 kids of all differing abilities and then they can whine? I'm not sure where you're coming from.
Es todo bueno!
www.iharris.avonrepresentative.com
Do you teach at a community college or a university and where do you teach? I teach at a community college in Ontario, Canada and it really isn't as easy as simply kicking disruptive kids out of class. And, sadly, yes there are disruptive students at the community college level. You would think that it would be different with adults but it is not, at least here in Ontario. This movie really reminded me very much of teaching at the college level here and the first year teacher's experiences reminded me only too much of some of my experiences when I began teaching in college.
shareAs someone mentioned, the students in the film (myself being one of them) were volunteers so they took what they could get. :) Many students had family trips that took them away from filming. I got a summer job which clashed schedules towards the end of filming (but it did make for my main line!)
Even if the class sizes weren't a large as a normal one would be I think the volunteers added a lot of realism to the film. The director, Mike Akel, was a teacher at our school and new all of us and our personalities. He used that to build scenes that, from my perspective knowing the students, are very real.
Will really does use big words. Daniel is a smarta** and Shamika really does rap when Matt throws down a beat.
As a teacher of 17 years, I can tell you that the class sizes were definitely not realistic. Even here in the rural midwest, our class sizes have always been much larger than those portrayed in the film. Don't even get me started on the detriments of large class sizes!!!
shareI would LOVE to have classes that were as small as they are in this movie. We could actually get real learning done. Unfortunately this is not a DOCUMENTARY. So please, support education. It's important.
shareI live in the suburbs of ohio and that was the size of everyone of my honors courses. We had no more than 15 at a time in Honors English, AP History. My class small too , under 150 kids for a public High School.
shareI can say that as a teacher I am very fortunate to teach at a school that has fairly reasonable class sizes. My class sizes are as follows: 7, 23, 20, 22, 22 and 18. With my biggest class being 23 students, I fully believe those class sizes to to be possible, particularly at a smaller school.
shareExtremely small.
I teach English in a small town in Texas and my smallest class is about 15, but it's a special class. All the rest are no less than 25 up to 31.
I teach in brooklyn ny
Legal class size here in the city is 34
average REPORTED class size is 32. My smallest class is 30 kids.
I have friends who work in schools where the AP's fudge the class roster numbers and have close to 40 kids in a room.
My first thought while watching was: man, I would LOVE to teach there (not in a sarcastic way)
I went to public school and graduated last year. On average there was like a max. of 23ish kids in a class. Most had somewhere in the teens. I had two classes my last semester that only had 8 of us for then enitre class. It was low level classes that were the smallest. The higher level classes were also small, but I was never in a class where there were more than 23 students. Honestly I didn't think that the class sizes were to small. I thought they were normal. We even had 350ish kids in our graduating class give or take some in the lower grades.
shareDear Taxpayer,
You DO realize that this was not a documentary and that these were not actual classes, right? Ever been to a play where the set is the home of one of the characters, and you only see one room where all the action is taking place? If so, you wouldn't walk out of there saying, "Is it true that all houses have only one room and doors that go to nowhere?"