Overflowing Classes: The Struggling Issues of Teachers and Students

   By: Allison Keenan

    Many people know that a large amount of our classes are overflowed with students. I have surveyed many students in each grade and asked them a couple questions about which classes they have overflowed, how it affects them, how they believe it should be fixed, and how they think the teachers are fixing it.

    I wanted to get helpful answers so I didn’t ask for the students to put their names, just their grades and gender. Of course I had some bad surveys where the students obviously didn’t care about it at all. But I had plenty of great surveys that helped me get what I needed. A majority of the students had at least one overflowed class and told me how they felt about it.

    “It distracts my learning”

    “It is very difficult to hear or complete our lessons because of so many people”

    “We usually have trouble starting class on time because the teachers have a hard time controlling all of the students.”

    These three quotes were the main things said by a lot of students. So I asked them how they believe it should be fixed and how they believe that the teachers are trying to fix it. There were many comments that were made that could actually help fix the problem. And I believe that we should take these suggestions into consideration.

    “I think the teachers are fixing it by adding more desks to each room”

    “Make a new building”

    “More classrooms”

    “Move some kids around”

    “Bigger classrooms”

    I know that these were short comments, but if you were to think about it, they are actually giving us something to consider. Obviously we aren’t going to kick people out of the school, but there are many things that we can do and that teachers are trying to do to solve this problem. Now we could also put the blame on the teachers like many students are doing, but there is only so much that they are able to do. They are adding desks and trying to move kids around, but it is almost impossible with a class of thirty-five or more students.

    To become even more controversial, I not only asked students to give me the names of teachers that teach their over flowed classes, but I also emailed a few of the teachers. I went through over one-hundred surveys and wrote down the names of each teacher that was mentioned, and then with an outcome of about twenty- seven teachers, I rounded it down to the ten most mentioned teachers. I emailed every teacher and asked them a few questions also to see it from their view. Now although I emailed a couple teachers, I have only gotten responses from about two of them. So I asked them mainly the same questions as the students and have gotten a few good responses.

    “It changes the way I teach. I like to be “interactive”…. Being able to model/show students how to do things… large classes prevent this from happening”

    “More classes/teachers would be helpful”

    “The only challenges created by this many students are logistical”

    “Students are shoulder to shoulder and this makes it hard to circulate through class to check student work”

    “We need more faculty”

    Seeing these answers, the teachers and the students have about the same thoughts about their overflowed classes and how they believe that it should be fixed. I really think that what we learned from this article, we could try to make more classes comfortable to learn in by downsizing classes and possibly adding more staff.