Especially for Teachers

Good News About Good Schools

Monday, September 26, 2005

1 plus 1 makes for positive classroom experience

By Pamela Hasterok | FRESH TALK

The pupils maneuver the oversized red and navy Legos into the proper formations: one red and one blue equals two, three blue and three more equals six. Amazingly, the children don´t play with the plastic blocks. No starships or laser guns emerge during Sarah Mateer´s math lesson.

That´s because veteran teacher Patricia Burkhalter circles the room like a soaring eagle, landing beside any pupil in their shared Horizon Elementary first-grade class who´s confused or inattentive.

"How many plus how many equals six?" she asks a shy boy who looks down at his paper. "You got it!" she cheers.

Classroom 10 looks like any other. The alphabet is strung above the chalkboard, numbers one through 20 are brightly illustrated below it. Paper cats, fish and dinosaurs dangle from the ceiling while crazily colorful paper dolls -- a lesson about body parts -- line the back wall. Only the missing desks (traded for space-saving tables) give you a clue that this classroom is unique with its 33 pupils and two teachers.

The children like the arrangement.

"It´s better with two," said Kayle Gibson, 7. "We get to learn and we get to have fun."

The teachers like it, too.

"I love this," Mateer, a third-year teacher, says. "It´s more creative."

The state Board of Education doesn´t love it. It banned co-teaching after next year. It won´t allow school districts to use it to cut the number of students in each class, a requirement since voters changed the state constitution three years ago. By 2010, schoolrooms should have no more than 18 pupils in kindergarten-third grades, 22 in fourth-eighth grades and no more than 25 students in each high school class.

Margot May, the principal at Horizon, doesn´t love co-teaching, either. It´s not the best learning environment for children -- like most educators, she believes one teacher with fewer pupils is optimum. But when Horizon got 120 extra students and just five more portables this year, co-teaching was her only choice.

So far, it´s working. It has to. Volusia County received just $4 million from the state to build and maintain schools, down from $45 million five years ago. It´s working because teachers like Mateer and Burkhalter dedicate themselves to making it work.

But it isn´t the best way for children to learn. Here´s the sad part. Long before Floridians voted to require fewer students in each class, teachers shared classrooms. When I started kindergarten, co-teaching was common at my school.

So the Board of Education is right when it says co-teaching is not the best way to teach kids. It´s right when it asks for almost $2 billion to build 7,000 classrooms.

But it´s wrong to ban co-teaching as a way to undercut the class size requirement. It´s wrong to do it to make life difficult for school districts, because it will also make it difficult for students. If the ruling stands, children will be forced to attend shortened days at double-shift schools. More libraries, music and art rooms will disappear.

Meanwhile, states that invest in top-notch teaching -- Massachusetts, for example -- offer more instruction every day and a longer school year. They assign a first-grade teacher no more than 15 pupils and require her to have a specialty in early education. They provide all teachers with assistants, all children with books and all classes with computers. They hold pre-kindergarten classes for 4-year-olds and college-prep courses for 14-year-olds.

But Florida is stuck in a literal argument over how many children can sit in a classroom. It´s reasonable for a child younger than 9 to share the attention of a single teacher with 17 others. It´s acceptable to require one teacher to instruct 22 fourth-graders. It´s livable to expect a lone soul to teach 25 high-schoolers. It´s not good and it´s nowhere near excellent, but it´s OK.

Cutting the number of students in a class doesn´t guarantee a first-rate education, just that they receive a bare minimum of a teacher´s attention. Still, it´s a start.

Florida´s kids deserve at least that much.

Call Hasterok at (386) 681-2223.

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