Weekly News Archive

September 12 (’04) – September 18 (’04)

School Keeps Breaking

School’s still settling out; here’s a few bits and pieces to tide you over.

• “I am a maths teacher in a ‘bog standard’ comprehensive school. In the autumn term of 2002 I kept a full diary of a week’s lessons, and this is an edited version of it.” Oh boy. Yes, there are worse situations than Berkeley High’s; take a look.
• “Fighting School Board Inanity Since 2004” Indeed so — very interesting material, a blog focused on news from the trenches of education today, and perhaps a key ingredient in taking discussions of “the right thing” in schools today away from philosophy and into the realm of reality.

Word from several fronts is that an old bogey has returned to haunt our hallowed halls — overcrowding, at least in some sectors. Science is perhaps the major one; biology teacher Brandon Delp offers a succinct summary:

I am a biology teacher. For some reason I average 38 humans per class. This is not good news.

Firsthand I know that this is true, and that physics classes are equally booked (to the tune of ~40 students or more). To the best of my knowledge the largest factor here is simply a shortage of teachers — this year many are, well, gone. On the other hand, heavily overfilled classes at the beginning of the year is not a new phenomenon, either, and only if they remain so for a month or two will the problem really prove serious. Students transfer, drop, stop coming. We’ll see.

Only a couple of days to sign up for the October 9 SAT (either I or II); if you’re a senior and need to take any such tests still, try hit this one for sure; if you’re a junior, consider it. CollegeBoard.com can hook you up.

— Brandon