There are moves in Alberta to try to get smaller classes so students get more individual attention with the teacher.  The 2012 plan is to try to have small classes in kindergarten and elementary with larger ones permitted for secondary.   In 2003 suggested guidelines were maximum 17 students in kindergarten classes or up to grade 3, maximum 23 students per class in grades 4-6, maximum 25 in grades 7-9 and maximum 27 in grades 10-12.

However the formula has been questionned. Depending on how it is calculated it may not recognize that teachers who do administration are included as teachers.  In theory the balance may be 25 students to one teacher but in practice it is often way more.   In 2012 I have seen elementary classes pushing the limit and some high school classes over 40.

People say that it’s always been so, that teachers always want smaller classes and that we have it easier than earlier teachers had it. On the surface this looks true. However teachers today have to teach a lot more curriculum, do a lot more recording about each student and are held accountable for a lot more adaptation to needs of each child.  Some elementary teachers have a class of 20, yes but in the elementary school there may be a music or phys ed or computer teacher who teaches every single student in the school, several hundred.  Special education classes are smaller and in some options a smaller class is considered best for allowing everyone a chance to use the shop equipment or to speak a lot while learning a second language.

In the junior high schools I teach at,  there may be six classes of 30 students in each of 3 grades.  These are very high energy kids, often very clever, and today’s kids are healthy and often tall.  They are our best and our brightest. I love these schools because the energy level is electric, the hallways are vibrant, enthusiasm for life is palpable. And yet these kids are also often restless and need great, creative teachers.  A math teacher may see eight classes a semester so 240 students, 120 per day.  Each class may only have 30 but she has to do marking for 240.  Class size then becomes a little misleading as a goal number.

In the senior high, classes usually last longer, sometimes 90 minutes a day. A  teacher may only per semester have 3 or 4 classes.  That means that teacher may only have around 90-120 students but because these classes are one semester, intense and focused, and because the curriculum requires coverage of a lot of concepts, the teacher has a lot of work..  There are 120 worksheets to mark, 120 quizzes, 120 tests, every time. She has to create 120 report cards with peronalized comments every few months and if the subject requires projects and essays, the teacher has to read and mark 120 of those, every few weeks.  Many people do not realize that class size only vaguely changes the hugeness of that task description.  In the US some teachers, feeling the public does not understand how much time they spend just marking, have on a weekend set up a table at the mall to visibly do a “Mark In”.

It is true however that earlier teachers had in a classroom a lot of kids and they did have that challenge of many grades, simultaneously. It must have been daunting. In 2012 some teachers also teach several grades but not all at once. A person may teach grade 8 math, then a class of grade 9 math, then a grade 7 math. In some schools with grades 7-12, the teacher may teach several of those 6 grade levels over the course of a day but they usually don’t have to do it simultaneously.

Having more than one grade in the room is not impossible. It can even have its advantages since younger children can watch and learn from what older ones are doing and older ones get a casual review if they missed learning something well. But for a teacher trying to plan lessons for several different grades at once, it must have been very tricky.

The multi-grade trend is returning.  In 2012 there are many ‘split grade ‘ classes, and intentionally. An elementary school may have 60 grade ones and 60 grade twos and could put them in 6 classes of 20 each. But it may opt to have a few of them as grade one-two splits. This blending of children helps the slower learner of an upper grade or the advanced learner of a lower grade benefit from each other’s lessons.  But again, teachers in those  situations often find they are doing double the planning, and that takes time, and they are forever trying to juggle what one group is doing while the other is being taught. Obviously the intent is to share some subjects, maybe story time, music, social studies, and to differentiate ones like math or reading. 

The other consideration of schools was physical space and literal ‘overcrowding’. How much room does one student need?  Early legislation set up rules for how much floor space and window space were required per pupil for a good learning environment.  If we overcrowd small rooms, we risk stress-inducing tension. 

In some schools if there are 40 students, and only 39 desks, there is a crisis and if there is not even room for the other desk, someone has to sit at a back table.  Kids need room to move around, and the younger they are the more room they seem to need.   If we do not permit that, there is a problem with ability to learn.

A third issue is noise level.  In early schools the silence rule is enforced most of the time. The big sandstone schools have high ceilings and very solid walls so noise had a place to go upwards and did not go to other classrooms.  Depending on wall construction, if we overcrowd modern rooms, the noise not only may be disruptive within the room but outside it.

A kindergarten teacher pointed out to me not long ago that the recent fad of two classes per room, in a very large room, is a mixed blessing. Yes the room seems huge and in theory can accommodate two classes but for the little kids, even if there are only 16 per class, they are hearing the sounds of 32 kids, and that is very distracting for them.   She suggested that we look not just at ‘class size’ when we speak of what matters but also ‘group size’. It was a concern for early teachers too.

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In 1893 at Knox Presbyterian church basement, the temporary school had one teacher and 53 students. The temporary school above the police station had one teacher and 80 students.

Those  numbers are a bit deceptive because the school year was less regimented and parents did not always prioritize going to school if there was farm work to do.  In 1892 at one school there were 88 students registered but only 27 attended. Attendance rates were often around 50%.

In 1900 Calgary had 13 teachers and 739 students, and that ratio turns out to be 56 to 1.  When Alberta became a province it had 562 schools, 34,000 pupils and 1200 teachers but some small rural schools may have had about 8 while others had dozens. The average was though 28 students per class. Such numbers are a bit misleading though, like telling average depth of a lake. It was  legal to set up a school for as few as 8 school aged children in any district five miles in any direction if 3 rate payers petitioned for it.

Class size changed with the community’s economy too. In 1911 Alberta had 61,660 students, half of them rural. There were 1784 school districts and 2651 teachers, giving a ratio of about 23 students per teacher.

 In 1912 there was a high dropout rate just because students had little trouble getting jobs in the boom time.  When the boom came though, the city of Calgary exploded with newcomers.  By 1914 there were  9587students in public school, five times as many as just 8 years earlier.  They crowded up the classrooms quite nicely.

By 1919 Hillhurst school had 42 students per teacher. The assembly hall even had to be converted to classrooms.

Since children were not moved to a new grade until they had the skills for it, this created some oddities. A child who was clever could move up several grades in one year, especially in the rural school system. This was helpful because some students had not been able to start school till older or attended only sporadically.  But it was also a problem in other ways, socially and for self-esteem.  In 1921 one school inspector was concerned that ages of children in  grade one were from 5-7 years but that in grade 2 the range was  from 6-12 years.  Two of the students in second grade at one school were teenagers -one fourteen and one fifteen.  This spurred jokes like saying “Three of the best years of my life were spent in grade one” but seriously, issues were raised about humiliation if a child felt too old for the grade.  In 1925 too, when teachers were often only about 18, it was challenging to teach students who were 16. 

In the city classes became large in the 1920s.  In 1929 Crescent Heights had 40 students per class.

Even by 1930, in rural schools outside of Calgary, some of the students may not have been to school for 4-5 years and when they entered the system, class size was far from the only challenge the teacher faced. In 1935 a one room rural school had 36 students in  8 grades.  Often there were some students in higher grades at rural schools taking their lessons by correspondence.  An irony has appeared too in official records where occasionally the teacher himself did not have grade 12, and took the subjects for it, right along with the students, by correspondence and wrote the exam with them.

In 1925 the average  class size was up again to 42 per class and some had over 45 students. Birth rates affected greatly how many students arrived at the door and money to pay teachers did not always go up.

During the Depression some students had to go out and get jobs so enrolment dropped and when they could not find jobs, they came back and enrolment went up again.  In 1935 at a rural school a 35 year old wanted to finish his grade 12. The man weighed 200 pounds and was bigger than the teacher but he was allowed to enrol.   When the school inspector came however, he mistook the boy in the playground for the teacher.

In 1934 there was demand for a new type of school, a junior high and 3 were opened in Calgary for grades 7-9.  The first ones had 866 pupils in 23 classes so a class size of 38.

When war hit, many male teachers and some female enlisted. Students old enough to join up often did so also.  One might think class size would go down, especially rurally but what often happened was that money was tight and schools were reluctant to hire new teachers so class size in some cases even went up. In 1942 a rural school may have 57 students and one teacher.

In 1940 Calgary had 7331 elementary and 520 secondary students with  182 teachers in the lower level and 17 in the higher. The official ratio there was 1 to 40. in elementary and 1 to 30 in high school. After the war, the men came back, and many got married and had children.  Calgary also got an influx of military personnel who had been stationed here and by 1945 its population was 100,000.

By 1950 there was such a baby boom that schools were again bursting at the seams.  In 1948, 1338 children appeared for grade one at Calgary public schools but by 1956 there were 4200 kids wanting grade one. Thus continued the tradition of teachers waiting in trepidation to see September enrolment.  There is often a mad scramble to make sure you have enough teachers and classrooms for the kids at the door.

There were so many students now that the province kicked some of them out – discontinuing its kindergarten programs. Those children had to wait to come back till grade one. If the baby boom was big in the city, it was also big in the country since lots of newcomers gravitated to urban life.  Teachers in the country often stayed, liking the rural life and by 1948 many found they were now teaching the children of the first batch of children they’d taught in the 1920s. 

In 1950 through the province there were 173,000 students, 2136 schools and 6500 teachers. The ratio of adult to child, on paper is 26 to1 though of course if administrators did not teach full time, the actual class size was larger.

How much time with a teacher does each child need? In theory if each student has a computer, there is already a one to one ratio and some schools have moved to online courses in many areas. The advantages are clear. There are cost savings to school boards who then can  hire fewer teachers. Many exams now are also marked by computer, requiring less extra pay from the province for markers of departmental exams.

I guess for me this is a yin-yang, plus and minus.  I have found that computer taught courses are not very thoroughly taught. A computer can inform but does not really figure out what the child already knows, what the child understands and misunderstands and can’t walk the student through the particular areas that child needs.  It seems like an efficient one-size fits all instructor, but for me it does not really instruct. It reviews well, it allows good practice sessions. It just really does not teach.

As for computers marking exams, we have always known that only some questions can generate yes-no, or multiple choice answers. Open-ended free answers are not tapped when a computer asks the question and that means there are potential problems with fairness.  A computer can’t give half marks in math for getting all the stages of the answer right except the last one. A computer can’t test how well the child speaks or presents material in front of a group. A computer can’t appreciate humor in an answer or any creativity. Some kids get so nervous before exams that count over 50% of their mark that what is being tested is not the skill of the subject but how a person handles great stress.

I personally feel schools will always be struggling with class size ratio issues and how best to make sure each child has a chance to learn.  Computers are a partial answer, a nice resource, but they don’t replace real people.