Small Class Teaching: Will Your Kids Make Enough Friends?

Thanks Quam for giving me the opportunity to resume this column. And thank you, dear readers, for your support. i will be writing here every other week.

i recently read an interesting book "Freakonomics" written by economist Steve Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner. The bestseller discusses freaky topics such as why drug dealers live with their mums, why a swimming pool is more dangerous than a gun and why parents overreact to their kids.

Many parents think a mixture of the Baby Mozart tapes, the museum trips, the French lessons, hugging, quarreling and punishing would help shape better characteristic of their kids. The authors, however, argue that the parenting might matter less than parents would like to believe. Genes, they reckon, are responsible for 50% of a child's personality and abilities.

Interestingly, while claiming that parenting doesn't weigh much, Levitt and Dubner argue, in an earlier chapter, that the policy that permits abortion was an effective one to reduce crimes. Reshuffling the orders of the arguments, and you can sum them up like this: "Once your baby come out, you can do nothing to stop them from committing crimes. All you can do is to kill them in the first place." What a black humor!

i have no idea on the exact percentage about the power of genes. i am sure parents should not leave their kids alone. However, Mr. Levitt and Dubner do make a point when it comes to the influence of peers. The grassroots effect of peer pressure, "the blunt force applied each day by friends and schoolmates" outweighs the influence of parents.

i don't have any experience in parenting, but am always interested in chatting with my friends or colleagues who have become fathers and mothers about the subject. To them, it is a bigger-than-life subject. For investment questions, they know Quam has the answer. But for parenting, who can give them the best advice? Parenting experts are as divided as investment gurus on their respective subjects.

Here, rather than providing conclusions, i would like to open more battlefields.

Teachers are campaigning small classroom teaching, and the government is conducting a study on that. According to the proposal, the size of a class should be reduced to about 25 from about 40. Are smaller classes better?

Back in the school years, i had respectable teachers. But there are teachers who never taught. In Form 5 (Grade 11), the year before the Examination of Certificate, my mathematics teacher was one of them. He walked into the classroom and said: "i will let you study on your own." Then, he sat down and kept silence for the whole session. Eventually, we got good grades in both mathematics and additional mathematics. (i fell onto the lower end of that spectrum though. i tried my best.)

One of my classmates, Thomas, has grown up to be a Physics teacher. The other day, i chatted with him. He admired the studying atmosphere was so good back then. i agreed. We voluntarily formed study groups, and studied after class. We shared study notes and sample examinations. We competed with one another in a positive way.

Now, i finally realize that mathematics teacher was a great teacher though he didn't teach me anything at all. He stayed aside and gave way to the power of learning from peers.

Examination scores do not show the full picture. Wah Yuen and Wing Ka enrolled in our class in Form 4, after migrating from mainland China a few years ago. i was impressed by their eagerness to learn. They didn't fear raising questions and their insistency to find the answers often pissed the teachers off. They got great scores in examinations.

Wing Ka was a mathematics genius. Wah Yuen had a younger sister to take care of. He had to cook dinner every night. And he always won in arm wrestling.

They were the first immigrants of my age i ever met. i learnt that one should not, and cannot, look down upon new immigrants. Respect to people from different backgrounds is very important, something that cannot be learnt from textbooks.

One argument for small class teaching is that small classes enhance the density of care by teachers. i am not sure if such a density does matter. (The greatest teacher Confucius has countless students.) But if it does, as many educators claim, the density of influence by parents must be greater than those by teachers in any case, whether it be small or big classes. In a big class, one teacher teaches 40 students. In a small class, he teaches 20 students. In a big family, a pair of parents takes care of up to 10 children. In a small family, a pair of parents takes care of one to two children.

Peers have the greatest influence as the theory follows. Each student has to face 19 to 39 peers.

Here is a resource allocation problem in which we have too many teachers and too few classes. The simplest way is to divide students into smaller classes. Teachers must be happy with that. Parents would be happy too. It feels like upgrading airline tickets from economy class to first class, where more freight attendants take care of fewer fliers.

What such a measure ignores is the benefit of learning from peers. The positive externalities of the "spill-over" effects have helped nurture the Silicon Valley, which is the most triumphed example. But such externalities are not confined to high technologies. They happen in social communities. A school is a preliminary community for kids to prepare themselves.

By increasing the "teacher" density, the arrangement will reduce the "peer" density. Making the already small community even smaller. The peer effect could be positive or negative. There are good peers as well as bad ones. Still, variety is a virtue.

i cannot conclude whether we should go for small class teacher or not. All i want to say is the authorities should take the peer effect into consideration. After all, students should be the top priority.

What are friends for? Besides all bad things they do to me, they are a good source of light bulbs that i need.

Jul 15, 2005
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