Quote:
Originally Posted by manwiches
What is classroom complexity you ask? I'll use my wife's current grade 4 classroom as an example. She had 29 kids to start the year. Now she has 31. She has 2 children with severe learning disabilities, 5 ESL students, and 2 students with severe behavioural issues. She has an EA that comes 30 min a day. And this is in a more affluent area of the the city. This doesn't account for her messaging parents after hours, marking and inputting grades, dealing with the emotional drain of the day and all this while still trying to plan and teach the other students in her class. She is burnt out every single day, and emotionally, physically, and mentally exhausted.
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Not to compare but this story is not unusual. Things are getting far more complex in classrooms and it affects the teachers' ability to reach every kid every day. It is so much different from when I started in 2014 that I honestly can't believe it's real and what's expected of teachers is insane.
I am Grade 6 in a suburban Calgary school and have 20 ESL students in my regular classroom of 28, 4 with special needs (daily documentation & reporting requirements are every 6 weeks instead of twice a year like regular students), as well as one more undiagnosed issue that affects the classroom in a big way. The reading level in my room ranges from non-readers to high school, and the math understanding in my room ranges from kids working on skip counting by 2's and 5's to kids solving complex algebraic equations.