Teaching in an urban district, I never thought I’d be in this situation.  My class is too small.  It has one student.

Originally, I thought it was a scheduling glitch, which it probably is.  I figured it would get cleared up.  The first day of school, I had no students.  Then I had one; but she was a junior, waiting to get transferred into a US II class.

Then one day a girl from another one of my US I courses randomly got transferred into my Period 6 Honors US History class.  She wasn’t going anywhere; she needed to take US I.  Apparently, no one else was coming in.  For the past week, it’s been a one student class.

At first, I thought this was another glitch that would sort itself out.  I alerted my supervisor and the assistant principal in charge of scheduling.  Nothing changed, so as far as I know they don’t care.

So now I’m left with trying to figure out what to do with a class of one student…

I tried to get a few more students transferred in.  I figured that a class of five or six students would be perfect.  This wasn’t meant to be, though.  Everyone I approached to change the schedules sent me to someone else, and eventually the trail went dead and there was no one else to approach.

For the past few days, I’ve just been following the lesson plans for my other US I courses.  I interject a bit more personalized dialogue, since I can talk with the single student.  But it’s still the same type of intro, activity (unfortunately no group activities), and recap discussion. 

I was kind of surprised by the whole situation, so I haven’t had the time to develop any special lesson plans or projects.  I’m also kind of hesitant to do so, because I don’t want to spend a lot of time working on plans for a class that might change at any second.  I might show up to school one day to find out that the class finally got eliminated.  Or I might show up to find out that 20 kids were dumped on me.

Within the next week or so, I intend to change the direction of the course… assuming that it’s still one (or five) students.  With such a small class, it seems perfect for exploratory and individual education. 

When we start each chapter, we do something for an introduction.  The students get assigned the various readings (section summaries, guided readings… whatever seems appropriate for that section) to cover the content.  Then, they have a week or so to do some kind of independent project.

The way the pacing guide is set up, each chapter has approximately 8-10 days.  If we spend two or three of those days doing introductions and covering some essential content, that’s 5-8 days left to do something else.  I just wonder if I’m going to run out of ideas for interesting one-person projects before the year is done.  Having enough students to make one or two small groups would make life a lot easier.

What else should I do?  Any suggestions?

This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 9:34 pm and is filed under Education, Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.