Why cutting education won’t work

I am in Dallas Texas and we have been experiencing budgets cuts for a while. We have just started recovering from our last.

I teach computer science and was a professional programmer. I have been teaching for 18 years and am about to get my first second generation student.

I have one class with a textbook and we get a new one every seven years. That means I am teaching Visual Basic.NET 2003 and Visual Basic 2010 is the current language. Not a huge deal but bothersome.

My computers are 2 years old. Again, not a big deal as my students treat them well and they are better then what the business labs just got.

I have 28 computers and I have taught as many as 28 students at once. When I do the computer lab has very little space for walking around. I can't teach more than 28 students as not only am I limited by computers but physical space. I have found that classroom management is influenced by the amount of physical space students have. I taught with 2 1/2 foot space per student for years and just went to 3 foot per student and the energy level went way down.

I know that pair programming is all the rage but with my layout that would give us 1 1/2 foot per student. Can you imagine being that close to a neighbor?

I have taught with in a traditional classroom with 40 students and frankly no one in the room had a quality experience. I was swamped with grading and couldn't get work back in a timely matter. There was no walking space for me to observe students. 

Frankly I have been in most of our classrooms at one time or another and more than 25 students just does not fit.

Then lets took about the amount of time per student. We have approximately 50 minute class periods. With 24 students, each student gets about two minutes of teacher time per day. Up to 30 and now we are at 1 1/2 minutes. And we haven't discussed that it takes more time to take attendance and sign truancy or homework sheets. 

We are spending money as efficiently as possible and cuts are not going to help.

It is important to invest money in our students. If they do not receive a quality education they won't have a future.

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