As Modesto Schools debate rages, here’s what I learned taking combined classes | Opinion

The controversy over combined classes at Modesto City Schools jogged some distant memories for me.

When Eisenhower was president, I attended a small parochial school in the Midwest. It was a working-class kind of town, and the school was in a building constructed in 1890 with four classrooms. Since the school offered first through eighth grade education, all the classes were combined.

Class size made the arrangement easier. My class was about 15 students, so there were about 30 kids, give or take, covering two grade levels in each classroom. As a youngster, I was unaware that this was unusual — pretty much all experiences were new to me at that point in my life.

I would say that the combined classroom experience didn’t permanently damage my intellectual capacity, although some of my friends might argue that point.

We were told that the combined classrooms offered some advantages. An ambitious and bright student could take both classes at once, advancing two grades in one year. Not many took advantage of that, although I’m told a few did. A struggling student supposedly could benefit from listening in on the lower grade lessons to review things they might be having trouble with.

Then again, there are obvious drawbacks, as some Modesto City Schools parents have voiced. Kids get half the instruction time, and are supposedly working independently while the other side gets the attention of the teacher. If a student has the wandering attention span that I did in grade school, they might not be diligently working on multiplication problems while the teacher is demonstrating to the other grade level how to parse sentences.

Since this was a long time ago in a parochial school, if a mind wandered too far, the teacher had a yard stick that was used to refocus attention. I don’t recommend a return to that teaching style.

One drawback I did experience was the leap from having the same teacher in the same room for two years at a time to a large high school where we had to adjust to changing teachers and classrooms every 50 minutes during the day. I could blame that for my algebra grades that first year, but there were probably underlying motivation problems…

While I remember taking some sort of standardized test every couple of years to measure our ability to use our noggins, there wasn’t the obsession with testing and performance measurements that permeate school systems today. And teaching methods, technology and curriculum have changed dramatically over the years.

Teachers today have a lot more material to cover and mandates to meet, for better or worse. I don’t recall state legislatures being very involved with what happened in the classroom back then, although as a grade-schooler, I may not have been aware of it.

Combined classrooms would also require teachers to prepare two lesson plans every day in addition to trying to cover a day’s worth of material in half the time.

Some have suggested a more radical reorganization of classroom education. One idea is to turn the homework paradigm upside down: Have kids learn the material at home through interactive videos, then come to the classroom to do homework, where the teacher is available to help them when they get stuck. That way the teacher can identify and give attention to those who need it, while other students can move ahead on their own.

I have no special knowledge of education, and so I don’t know if that would work, but it does make me wonder about the potential for greater use of technology in the classroom and at home.

Perhaps we could reach a time when students work at their own pace and capability, and arrive at the required knowledge without the structure of grade levels. But maybe I’m daydreaming again. I still cringe at the sight of yardsticks.