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Memoirs of a SLACer

sociological views on life and the liberal arts

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Class Size Update

October 15, 2009 by John

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.

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Posted in Teaching Tricks, Tracking the Transition | Tagged Class Participation, Class Size, Transition to Assistant Professor | 1 Comment

One Response

  1. on September 6, 2010 at 3:21 pm Less than the sum of its parts « Memoirs of a SLACer

    […] spring.  One of the things I quickly noticed about teaching classes with 25-35 students is that the dynamics are not that different than in a class of 65.  The caveat to this is that in a large class there are always at least a […]



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