Recently I spent some time at a small residential school. The school has a few tens of students between 8-17 years age, all together. The kids are taught by dedicated teachers who live with the children. So far I had seen schools where, each class has 30-40 children of similar age - larger than the entire student population of this school. This was a very novel experience for me.
I felt something missing amongst the children as time went by. These students were missing out on the scale of interactions. With only handful of children, the number of possible interactions was also limited. Learning that naturally happens when many children chatter with many more children was not possible here.
Consider four children interacting with each other. There are unique 12 ways in which you can connect four children. Ajay interacting with Aparna is different from Aparna interacting with Ajay. For five children there are 5 x ( 5 - 1 ) = 20 ways. If there are n-children then there are n x ( n - 1 ) ways to connect them.
For large number of children the number of possible interactions become square of the number of children ! Because, now there is not much difference between n and n-1. There are 992 direct interactions possible in a class of 32 children. And we haven't even counted second-hand interactions. When two children are talking a third child is also gaining something.
There is this advantage of having a large class of students of similar age which I was not so much aware of before today. More number of interactions only help a group of children with mixed abilities. If a teacher can foster useful discussions in the class, then larger the number of children in class the better.
I felt something missing amongst the children as time went by. These students were missing out on the scale of interactions. With only handful of children, the number of possible interactions was also limited. Learning that naturally happens when many children chatter with many more children was not possible here.
Consider four children interacting with each other. There are unique 12 ways in which you can connect four children. Ajay interacting with Aparna is different from Aparna interacting with Ajay. For five children there are 5 x ( 5 - 1 ) = 20 ways. If there are n-children then there are n x ( n - 1 ) ways to connect them.
For large number of children the number of possible interactions become square of the number of children ! Because, now there is not much difference between n and n-1. There are 992 direct interactions possible in a class of 32 children. And we haven't even counted second-hand interactions. When two children are talking a third child is also gaining something.
There is this advantage of having a large class of students of similar age which I was not so much aware of before today. More number of interactions only help a group of children with mixed abilities. If a teacher can foster useful discussions in the class, then larger the number of children in class the better.
