Early in the semester I stated:
Thankfully, none of my classes have what I consider to be too many students. I was surprised recently to hear somebody complain about having 27 students instead of the expected 22. I realize that, for a class of that size, five students is a 23% increase, but I cannot yet grasp the idea that 27 students can be too many. Of course, I’ve been conditioned by teaching years of classes with between 50 and 80 students. Maybe I need to bookmark this post and read it in a year or two when I find myself acclimated to my new environment and complaining to the registrar about every student over 20.
While I still don’t feel that any of my classes are too big, I have been surprised by the lack of difference between teaching a class of 65 students and a class of 35 students. One nice thing is that grading takes about half as long. In terms of the proportion of students who participate daily and the day-to-day classroom experience, though, things are not a lot different. I’m not ready to start complaining yet, but I wouldn’t mind a smaller class. I guess I vastly overestimated the amount of time it would take to change my perspective on this issue.
Memoirs of a SLACer 