The Teacher's Attention: Why Our Kids Must and Can Get Smaller Schools and Classes

Conclusion

W hen I entered high school as a ninth-grader, the school was bursting at the seams. It was the same year a neighboring high school was being closed down, and the other three were accommodating its students. Accommodated is not how I felt among the more than two thousand other teenagers. I became overwhelmed and disconnected. I began to skip classes and stop doing homework. By midyear I’d succumbed to clinical depression. I was more fortunate than I might have been, though. Because I’m white, I did not also have to deal with a standard dose of institutional racism on top of the alienating size of my school. The history textbooks were full of people who looked like me, and my dialect of English was also the language of instruction. And because my parents could afford the private school where I fled the next year, my family had more options than a poorer one would have. But no one should have to go through what I went through—or worse—and no one should have to pay tuition for what I got: a small school with small classes where I could get to know my teachers and they could get to know my parents. You may be asking, “How much will all this cost again?” Small schools with classes of twelve will cost a mere 20 percent more. That’s $420 a year per worker—estimating on the high side. Spread over 365 days of the year, that’s $1.15 a day—the price of a vending machine item or two. Break that down by the 1,440 minutes in a day and it takes a quarter of an hour to Conclusion What kids these days need is a good listening to! —Nicole Gnezda (2005, p. 39) 186 / Conclusion spend a cent. Each of us pays a penny every quarter hour of our 30ish-year work life. As a fraction of our country’s wealth that goes to all tax revenue, this plan for relationship load reduction would raise our total tax burden by only 0.8 percent, from paying 25.5 percent to paying 26.3 percent, leaving the United States still the second cheapest place to earn income in the “developed” world. You may be thinking, “Remind me why this focus on relationships doesn’t direct schools away from learning.” I’ve tried to show that learning is best thought of as a fortunate consequence of the primary goal of paying attention to kids. So long as you meet their need for your attention, they tend to absorb what you want them to know. Even if you’re not actively trying to teach them, they absorb the example of what you’re doing because they want to grow up to be like you. Evidence suggests that students in small classes are more willing to do unappealing schoolwork. That follows from the fact that the content is really secondary to the context of childrearing. As long as we care about and pay attention to kids, they give us a lot of latitude in what it is we ask them to do. Even though our curricula could very often be a whole lot more challenging, culturally inclusive, meaningful, or engaging, it matters less than whether grouping size is small enough to be able to meet emotional needs simultaneously but foremost. This runs contrary to much of current discourse in education whose subtext is that only rarely attained teaching quality is really “good enough.” I find this logic far more utopian than achieving grouping size reduction. The double bonus of meeting needs in their proper order of importance is that it gets easier to improve the content once you’ve improved the context. Again, students in a small class whose more fundamental needs are better met will engage with work that they might not engage with in a large class simply because of how they feel—even if the work is exactly the same. Of course, teachers don’t have to use the same work if they don’t want to; they can assign the kind of work in a small class that’s more appropriately challenging and personalized. This corroborates one of my most firm convictions of personal experience: Small-class work can be made more cognitively challenging for every student because it can require and receive more interaction, support, and clarification from the teacher. It is largely because the teacher can’t help a student...