At one time, a grade one teacher welcoming twenty-three smiling, fresh faces on the first day of school would be considered akin to a Norman Rockwell painting. Today, in many provinces, it is eschewed, because the provincial governments have mandated smaller class sizes. If a grade has twenty-three eager tykes, instead of the mandated twenty-one or other randomly chosen number, then the school has some serious rearranging to do. In some cases, it means busing kids to far away schools that still have room. More often, it means split grades. A handful of kids gets moved into the grade two class, leading to some grade twos going up to grade three, and so on, just like a domino game, except this time the children are the game pieces.
Of course, if your child ends up in the lower end of the split, like my friend Barb’s did, this can be welcome news. Your child will be challenged because he or she can hear the lessons from the upper grade. But what if your child is on the upper end of the split? You feel as if your child hasn’t really progressed. And you may be right.
Take a boy I’ll call Tom. Extremely intelligent, last year he was in the bottom of a 7/8 split. For the first few months he found himself actually having to think, and enjoyed doing the grade eight work. Unfortunately, this year he’s also in a 7/8 split. But he’s already covered the curriculum. He’s preparing to concentrate on Xbox this year, and it’s hard to blame him.
Split grades can be difficult for slower students, too. The classrooms tend to be noisier since everybody is doing something different, and “busy work”, like worksheets, take up a greater proportion of time than they do in straight grade classrooms. Studies also show that the teachers spend the majority of their time focused on the younger students, leaving the older ones, who often struggle to begin with, even further behind. And teachers themselves rate such classes as far more stressful to teach than straight grades. The amount of curriculum they’re required to cover is almost doubled, but they don’t have any extra time to do it. That’s why teachers with seniority more often elect to teach the straight grades, leaving the more inexperienced teachers with the split classes. In that environment, how can one possibly expect a teacher to cater to any individual child’s needs or learning styles?
Obviously the school system is not set up to cater to the individual child, though, which is one of the reasons I’ve never been in favour of traditional schooling in the first place. In fact, I’m probably not one to talk about schools at all, since we homeschool. But all my friends are constantly griping about the issues at their kids’ schools, and I find myself rather mesmerized by the complexity of the problem, almost like watching a car wreck from the sidelines. You have no emotional involvement of your own, but it’s hard to keep your eyes away.
In the split grade classroom of two over which I preside, my youngest child’s math is three grade levels ahead of her language arts, while my oldest daughter is taking language arts two grades ahead of her math level. And none of it matters, because we can work at their pace. You just can’t get those kinds of allowances being made in the school system. In response, parents often latch on to anything that might seem to present an opportunity for their children to be challenged, even if it means split grades. Ultimately, though, I’m not sure it’s good for the system as a whole, or even ultimately for those children themselves. The schools just delay the even worse boredom that awaits these kids when they, like Tom, end up redoing a whole year through no fault of their own.
I don’t see an easy to answer out of this split-classroom dilemma, except to say that the government should stop micro-managing schools. Politicians may win brownie points by promising reduced classroom sizes (remember Dalton McGuinty here?), but few realize what that means once it’s implemented: split grades, kids having to be bused to a far away school, and even siblings being separated, all so we don’t end up with two or three too many kids in one classroom. Campaign promises may sound wonderful, but real results are better. I don’t think there’s ever going to be a solution to what ails the school system except for giving parents and individual schools more power to figure out what they need. I hope our provincial governments will one day agree.
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