Lets to the time warp again, or something.

“And of course, three weeks before the final exam, we are again disrupting classes by separating them into lower and higher level classes. It did not work last year, or the year before, or, yes, earlier this year, so maybe if we do it now, at some random point, just maybe it will work now.”

That was my reaction to what was going on at school, again.

Earlier this year the school tried this little mess of an idea. To be fair to the school, I’m fairly sure this is an Education Department decision. What you do is you separate the lower and higher level students, allowing teachers to teach a more uniform level of student. It is not a bad idea, given the right circumstances. We do not have the right circumstances.

The first problem is that they take two wildly different subjects, Mathematics and English, and divide students according to the average of the two. The first year the school did this I had a girl in the lower level class who lived in the US for a year and spoke near perfect English. When I asked her about it she said that she sucked at mathematics so was forced to go to lower level English. Hopefully Mathematics is easier to teach with 40 low levelled students, but I doubt it. This poor girl got screwed for both subjects.

The second problem is class size. Forty higher level students who put their heads down and do the work are great. What more could you want from a class. However, 40 little arseholes who are too lazy or too cool to study are impossible. Half of them never progressed past 3rd grade elementary school level and the rest, even if they do understand, are just not interested in working. You help one student and ask them to go on and the moment you turn your back they start talking and playing, and just in case you missed it the first time, there are forty of these monsters in the same class.

I don’t want this and more importantly none of the other teachers want this. I’m pretty sure many parents don’t want this either. The first time they tried this, it was started in the middle of a semester and they went back to normal in the middle of the next semester. I am saying middle, not beginning or end, but middle. Last year the same things happened. Earlier this year, when I heard we were doing this again I started laughing, explaining what would happen. My one co-teacher assured me that they would keep the separation. The order to change back to usual came a few weeks later.

Somehow, despite the recent failure, “we” are giving it a second try within the same year. It only took 20 minutes before I felt like seeing if my fist would draw blood from a face.