It’s 7:40 in the morning and all the students in class are looking around the room: far from full. With only seven students in total, AP Environmental Science, taught by science teacher Gareth Engler, is one end of the spectrum in terms of class sizes. On the flip side of this, however, are many large English classes. For example, fourth-period AP Language and Composition, taught by English teacher Jodi Howell, which is packed to the brim with forty-one students. That is a difference of 35 students.
Teaching these classes comes with a variety of challenges and upsides.
“Being able to navigate the room when all the bodies are in the classroom [is very difficult],” Howell said. This is due to the fact of Howell’s long and narrow classroom shape.
“It’s very hard to make your way around the room for students as well,” Howell said. “They can’t really get to me and I can’t really get to them.”
However, Howell does say there is a positive side to large classes.
“I do prefer [classes] on the larger size just because of how many interactive things I can do,” Howell said.
At the other end of the spectrum is AP Environmental Science, which is the smallest class in the school and proves to be a different challenge for the teacher.
“[Having both] really low [amounts of students] is hard and really high [amounts of students] is hard,” Engler said.
With a small class, moving groups and having group assignments are much harder to arrange.
“A small class is nice again, kind of like field trip-wise,” Engler said. He furthermore says that having classes to teach after AP Environmental, limits the activities that they could do out of the classroom.
Both sides of the extreme prove to have varying ups and downs with the amount of space in classrooms, time for activities, and levels of interactivity. With some classes being very sought after and some being really niche, numbers have a tendency to be all over the place. This is what can cause these extreme class sizes and brings the pros and cons of these big and small classes.
