‘As a teacher, class size had little influence on the quality of education’

I’ll throw up if I hear one more person going on about class sizes. How long do we have to listen to experts, who have probably spent very little time (if any) in an actual classroom? Every year it’s the same. More money needed, smaller classes needed etc. Well I think it’s good to have 30 in a class and not small classes of less than 20, which are really boring.

With 30 kids you have a lovely mix of kids and teams for games. Discipline is largely anonymous. You don’t have to speak the child’s name it can be as simple as, “I can see someone in the back row who is not following instructions, and look at that great row they’re all working so hard. Have an extra point.” Usually there are a few kids away sick so you could end up with 28.

Bigger classes are stimulating for kids and teachers. Combining classes for some lessons is great, which would give you 60 kids. You use the hall or some under cover area. One teacher directing things and the other helping kids. Doubling up like that keeps teachers happy too since teaching can be a lonely, isolated job.

By the way what is wrong with kids in rows? If the teacher is actually out the front teaching how difficult it must be for the children who are side-on and have to crane their necks to see the teacher, or worse still have their back to the teacher. (That’s a discipline problem waiting to happen.)

Yes I know some lessons are better in groups where the tables are pushed together — I’m thinking art/craft/science lessons where resources are shared, but for lots of lessons why not be comfortable and face the front?

I once worked out that around five minutes a day are spent learning something entirely new, the rest of the time is spent practising what you already know or communicating or doing.

The truly innovative thing that happened in my 40 years of teaching was carpet on the floor! Yes something as basic as that made a huge difference.

The scraping noise used to be excruciating. Carpet also meant kids could move and lie on the floor for some of their work and not be trapped behind a desk. Though that does remind me of a time when they were sitting on the floor sewing and managed to sew the fabric to their shorts then tried to stand up. Hilarious.

Teaching reading! What a can of worms that is, whole word versus phonics. Ridiculous. How long do we have to talk about this? Of course it’s a combination, the English language being what it is with stolen words all over the place.

I used to pick an interesting article from the newspaper and photocopy it so they all had a copy, read it through to the class and then choose the first 100 words to study. If the article had a picture accompanying it so much the better. First maths job for the day, count out 100 words and use them for lessons. Find words with double letters. Words ending with ‘s’, words with capital letters, small words within words.

Races — how many times can you write a certain word in 20 seconds. Rhyming words, etc. anything interesting you could dream up.

One article sticks in my mind. It told of an Italian jail (they had to illustrate this article themselves — art lesson) where the prisoner escaped from his cell by using dental floss to saw through the bars, which were made of carbon. From that article came discussions of a dental nature, writing topic — a visit to the dentist, geography — find Italy on the map, design a jail, science – what is carbon and so on.

Why do you think they were in jail? Where is the closest jail? Repercussions of a jail sentence.

We looked at this article every day. By Friday the class could write out the 100 words for dictation and also read it aloud in around three minutes trying to read like a television/radio newsreader. While one child was reading the others would follow along and keep track of any wrong words using gatepost method. We would discuss a suitable error limit, say five, which meant 95/100. Invariably there were no errors.

One kid used a stopwatch to time people. Encouraging noises from teacher would follow. In that week I would have heard every child read once. Improvement? You bet. Mistakes? Rare.

But what about little kids I hear you say? Adapt it for little kids using comic/story books, but please leave Dick and Jane alone!

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