The Core Knowledge Blog

Class culture matters more than class size writes Pamela Felcher, a high school English department chair in Los Angeles. She makes some smart points about the classroom experience:

“I do not mean racial or ethnic or socioeconomic culture, I mean the culture of a particular group of students in a particular room in a particular institution. I have two 10th-grade classes of about 30 students each. One of them is an “honors” class; the other, “regular.” In my honors class, the 30 students are engaged and demanding. They probe texts, cultivate questions, encourage discourse and write analytically. My regular class, on the other hand, is allergic to homework; students belch aloud and feel no shame because this is “just school”; they bully and curse at one another; they cannot sit still; they cannot listen; and their distraction is heightened by the gadgets they carry.”

In both of her classes, writes Felcher in the L.A. Times, her expectations exceed her students, however the best students in the regular class, she notes “often collapse under the weight of the apathetic, the rude, the defiant, the indolent mass that defines that class’ culture.”