School has been going on for sometime and one thing is clear: class sizes are skewed this year. Some classes have an extremely large number of people while others are exceedingly small. These sizes are worrying because larger classes can overwhelm the teachers. There are no reason to overflow these classes when there is space in other classes who have less than 20 students.

One example of poor student distribution is the orchestra room. There are two classes for orchestra, but one is bursting at the seams with roughly 50 students, while the other has around twenty students. This distribution is extremely unbalanced and may lead to a larger amount of stress for orchestra director Kou Lee. There are some positives to this sort of distribution, however, that positive only benefits the larger class. With more students, you can produce a bigger sound that can sound more akin to a full orchestra. This sadly only benefits music classes.

Another subject that doesn’t have the best distribution is English. My english class only has 14 students and others seem to continue dropping out. This amount is very good for learning and helps the teacher teach, but the students who drop out have to be put somewhere.

Having smaller classes can reduce the discussion size by not having as many people in the class. It can reduce the diversity in the class, reducing the room for discussion on some topics. In my English class the male gender is overbearing with only three female students in the classroom.

This amount of students has even flowed outside of general classes and into study halls. This isn’t quite as bad as in the classrooms, but the fact that students have to be moved to the cafeteria because of the amount of students is insane. To even appear on the attendance sheet can be a lengthy process due to the student size and process of which it is done. The process is standing in a line to mark yourself. The system is fine with a standard amount of students, but because of the large line, it can take 15-30 minutes. That can take away the strength of having a study hall, reducing the time to be productive and doing work. Why have a study hall if you don’t have the time to work?

This issue on the whole is an organization problem. The positives that might be granted from various class sizes are very marginal and are almost fully outweighed by the negatives. The main solution to this issue is looking through all the classes and trying to organize the students. This solution isn’t the best, as it can take away some electives from some students and move them to other classes. Sadly, that isn’t the best solution, as some students wouldn’t obtain the electives they would want and are stuck with what the school gives them. Another big reason that this is happening is budget cuts. As teachers are fired not all classes are able to be active for all 7 hours of the day. These classes having less hours in the day requires more students are in classes.