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You have HOW MANY students? Discussions with Chilean teachers
After a session on getting technology into Latin American organizations convinced me I needed to know more about how Chilean schools operate, I scheduled interviews with several teachers. To say that their responses were eye-opening would be an understatement.
The first person I interviewed was an eighth-grade teacher and the first question I asked was a pretty simple one,
“How many students do you teach in a week?”
Now, I know my Spanish is not perfect, so when he told me, I shook my head and said,
“Excuse me, but did you just say you teach THREE HUNDRED eighth-graders in an average week?”
He nodded and said,
“It’s a lot, isn’t it?”
I asked him what he does if five or six students fall behind and don’t understand the material and he responded,
“What can you do? Nothing. There are just too many. I do the best lecture I can and if most students don’t understand then I try to re-teach it, but for that bottom 10% or 15% of the class, there is no way to have time to teach them separately. “
How do you have 300 students in a week? The average class size is 45 with seven classes a week.
