Showing posts with label Informational. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Informational. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Our classes get bigger, but our brains get smaller


Source:

The article Elementary Students in Large classes Tripled by Anna M. Phillips is about how in the past three years due to the recession there have been budget cuts in schools leading to lays offs. Which means there are less teachers but the same amount of students, so there are bigger classes with 30 or more kids in them. In the past 3 years about 5,300 teachers have been laid off. In some school districts up to 20% of the classes have more than 30 students! And a just a couple of years ago in 2009 the average fourth grade class was about 23 students!


Anna M. Phillips is trying to say that the recession has not only hurt the economy but children’s education. With so many children in one class, the teacher doesn’t have time to focus on all of them and give each one of them the attention they need. In the sixth paragraph a man named Mr. Lander said “ Both the data and common sense tell you that having a kid in a class of 30-plus means the teachers can’t possibly focus on them.”  And its not the teacher or the student, it’s the budget cuts. But everything affects everything. The economy lays off teachers, children have a worse education (due to bigger classes) and then we are left we unemployed people. Its not like they get another teaching job easily, no one is hiring.

I think that the children of the present are accomplishers of the future, and education is the beginning root to a good future. We have to know things to succeed. Learn how to interact with people and have more knowledge. The doctors, teachers, politicians, police men/woman, mothers and fathers of the future, need to have gotten their share of attention just as they were beginning to grow. Its like our life is a cake recipe. One of the most important parts of a cake is the flour, the ingredient that we start off with. Without it, after the cake has been taken out of the oven its just a pan of hot goop. And how can we get anything of that? Or a plant, it needs roots to take in water. And they may not be visible, but they are there. And without the roots the plant dies. It has nothing to keep it supplied. And nothing to even just keep it propped up!