I've been thinking that "Sid the Science Kid" with its class size of 4 makes "Cailu" with a class size of 8 look bad. When in reality class sizes for pre-school are more often 18-20.
Then there is "Dino Dan" that we're watching lately. His class is 3 girls and 3 boys. This is fondly reminiscent to "Magic School Bus." Let's think, Ralphie, Carlos, Tim, Phoebe, Wanda, and DA. Oh, 3 boys and 3 girls again.
You obviously don't want to have a television show with lots of kids in a class. That would be too hard to keep track of. It would give kids the impression that school is not so much a place of magic and learning, as it is a place of getting lost in the crowd.
That said, G's 1st grade class is actually only 4 kids. It's great. I love it that he's going to have small class sizes with the same kids for the next 12 years.
4 comments:
well, and they'd have to pay all those extra faces in the classroom on those tv shows.
I was thinking about how classes do sort of have only 4-8 kids in them. They are the really strong personalities. Then the rest of us just watch, like we are trained to by watching hours of TV.
From what I've observed in years of being a parent of kids in schools of assorted types as well as being a teacher in church classes and a guest teacher in schools, twelve is about as many pupils as any teacher can regularly benefit. Beyond that it becomes a matter of crowd control. As E noted, the strong personalities tend to dominate a class that is larger and the rest go along as relatively passive observers.
Arthur ostensibly shows normal sized classes, though I think there's only 6 kids shown regularly and there may be an outside number of 12 that are shown now and then. I think it has to do with constellations of personality type and behavior, such as are described by Peircian Semiotics (or the Star Trek bridge crew effect).
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