A teacher needs to know their students to be effective. This puts an upper limit on the number of students one teacher can teach at once. Something like 150 students. I need to know their names, and when I see that name a little about who that is.

Further, a student should have at least 4 or 5 teachers who know them. This is a selection of hopefully trustworthy and supportive adults they can turn to.

Most plans to make school less expensive mess with these numbers.

@richpuchalsky

I think it's beneficial to have education connected to larger secular bodies eg. the state because it forces all of the little communities with their "values" (values can be excellent, or horrible) to find some common ground.

Should we teach that the earth is flat?
Is evolution real?
Does *everyone* need to learn how to read?

If you let "the local community" decide such things they have often made the wrong call on these questions which have objectively correct answers.

@futurebird As a camp counselor, I had about 50 kids a week I could try to learn, and I never managed it. I didn't always eve manage to learn all 8 in my cabin, or all 12 in my lesson group. My director had much less time with the kids than I did, but still managed to learn them well.

When you were a new teacher, did learning and remembering 150 kids come easy to you? Or did you have to work at it?

@semitones

I had to learn to work with that many students. When I started 40 was my limit.

I make flash cards for names at the start of the year. I have a process where I spend a little time each week thinking about each student and I *track* this so I don't miss anyone.

I've learned when writing long comments when grading is important... and when to skip it.

I keep a spreadsheet with the learning specialists and tutors contact info for each student and send each one regular emails.

@futurebird @richpuchalsky Also looking at "home schooling" - this is not inspiring in many cases. Children need some sort of overarching organisation of schooling to (preferably) guard against the worst.

@richpuchalsky

I don't call myself an anarchist. Or anything really. I suppose I'm not since, from what I've seen as a teacher, people crave, love and seek out organization and someone to tell them what to do. This can be exploited so easily. Often it is exploited.

A lot of what I do as a teacher is try to get my students to stop turning to me to tell them what to do about every single thing.

And I use their inclination towards obedience to guide them towards that. Kind of a paradox.

@futurebird @richpuchalsky One of the reasons I don't call myself an anarchist is that I've participated in too many anarchist activist communities when I was young. When there is a strong narrative about not having any leaders *and* some anarchists are more charismatic than others, this is a recipe for ending up with completely unaccountable de-facto leaders that cannot practically be dealt with because nobody wants to admit that there *is* a leader. Like the witches on Pratchett's Discwordl: Anarchists are often very aware of exactly who the leader isn't.

(That said, anarchism has many healthy principles and is still - in my opinion - a good goal to aspire to. And this phenomenon - a social movement ending up being vulnerable to its own inversion - is also not at all unique to anarchism.)

@datarama @richpuchalsky

Like many specialists anarchists overestimate the appetite of the general public to think for itself. Even within their own organizations.

To think like an anarchist you must treasure a kind of independence and find joy in questioning authority.

But a lot of people (even me at times) really love "authority."

"Teachers could organize a body to ... "

nooo not more WORK.

@futurebird

I think that without the requirements of the state -- such as teaching to the standardized test and grading assignments that no one cares about -- there would actually be less overall work for teachers, not more.

@datarama

@richpuchalsky @datarama

I don't agree. Not having national standards just means you get a hodge podge of local ones which will on average be less well-thought out.

In some cases they *will* be better, but in many other cases they will be worse. Sometimes "worse" as in destructive.

I do agree there is too much testing.

But many of the national requirements are they only thing keeping schools from simply cutting out huge portions of the curriculum and hiring even less educated teachers.

@richpuchalsky @datarama

And there are conservatives, religious leaders, charter school grifters and assorted others who have been bouncing up and down excited to dismantle national standards for decades. If we only let them they wouldn't need to even try to teach "those" kids algebra. Think of the pliant employees without other options the schools could turn out for them. Think of all the money they could make running even worse schools.

@futurebird

Anarchism doesn't envision replacing one component of a horrible society and leaving the rest in place. I agree that it would be impossible to have anarchist schools as long as the rest of the state is there.

And once again: the state is not preventing local schools from being bad. What it's doing is presenting a system as standard when it is not, and therefore covering for the schools that are bad.

A teacher needs to know their students to be effective. This puts an upper limit on the number of students one teacher can teach at once. Something like 150 students. I need to know their names, and when I see that name a little about who that is.

Further, a student should have at least 4 or 5 teachers who know them. This is a selection of hopefully trustworthy and supportive adults they can turn to.

Most plans to make school less expensive mess with these numbers.

@futurebird 150 students seems awfully high. Is that one class, or divided across a set of classes? The number I've seen most often is that 15 students is optimum class size, that decreasing class size has lower gains, and increasing has clear losses.

@funnymonkey

Meals? Adults with enough time to get to know the students? You want to spend money on that?

No. Kids need to learn "workplace ready" skills. And they can eat iPads.

@futurebird @funnymonkey
Just generally, it's... *really* striking how consistently throughout history the wealthy and privileged neglect, resent, or simply fail to notice or understand the concept of peasants needing food.

@jhavok

150 is the total students in all of the classes that I teach, or my upper limit for doing any kind of effective teaching. You are correct that class size is better around 15.

@futurebird @jhavok
When I cited 1:20 in another thread, that was the number of kids in a classroom at a time. I think the full size of each class in the "class of 19XX" sense was about 200ish? It's been a long time, so I can't be sure. Things like it being a wealthy suburb that refused to participate in football so it would have more money for actual education stuck out in my mind more.

@pteryx @funnymonkey

Same people will get grouchy if they have to go to a long meeting and there is no coffee or little snacks.

But they think about food so little they might not even be able to articulate that is WHY they are grouchy. Because never thinking about food is one of many privileges.