I walk into Ucluelet Secondary School, and in the office a man looks up at me and smiles.
“You must be Adam” he says
“Oh! Hi… Kevin?”
“Yeah. Nice to meet you. C’mon, let’s go find Erin and discuss this field trip…”
I was in a high school, again, and already it felt good. I met with Kevin and Erin, who are both very real and kind-hearted people… and I don’t toss around words like that, lightly. The vibe I got from the school was very communal, and seemed like a great place to work. Kevin, between making hilarious macabre jokes with me about the current situation of public education, tells me he’s not only been working there for years, he even went to that very high school. Small town schools…. I think I may have found a place to aim at.
We went over the pages of lesson planning and pictures and charts I’d been creating over the past week and a half. Overall, they seemed pleased with the program. Only minor suggestions for edits. Which made me feel good, because Erin is a Biology teacher, and she didn’t find any glaring problems.
The D.E.E.P. lesson plan package I created, with editing notes.
We sat around in a sunny classroom and continued some real talk, too, about the education system, and what it was like to work in Ukee. At first, they had told me that “both [their] classes are going to come on the field trip into the park!”. I almost cried, thinking of trying to manage 60 high school kids running down a beach. But they saw the look of horror in my eyes, and laughed together. Kevin read my mind and interjected,
“No! Not 60 kids! Most of our classes don’t even have 10 students! … No, no… …. Erin, how many do you have in your Bio 11?”
“Well, actually we have some cross-overs… so 4.”
Did I just hear that correctly? 4?!
“Yeah, and in my Geo 12, I have about 10. So you’re looking at about 14, if everyone goes…”
Wow, that’s excellent. With class sizes so small, that makes me even more excited to try to find work in a remote district. That is one of my biggest concerns with the current schooling system: with class sizes of 30, that’s over double the amount of people that the human brain can simultaneously consider. It just seems like such a disservice to our children to throw them into such a large and impersonal space, and say: do your work. Get along. With smaller class sizes — up to 15, say — the opportunities for education are so much more human and just much more manageable, in general. Each student can be afforded the attention they deserve. But, usually, I think these kinds of small class sizes are only found in the private system… and that is an ethical conundrum that I had to deal with while teaching English at a language “school” in China. When money comes before learning — a scary, horrifying concept, it can be. So… what better a solution than simply to run away from the overpopulation of the cities?