Goodreads Bookshelf
Education... on paper
I was chatting with a friend of mine who teaches at a charter school in Cleveland. Today he found out his allotment for copies. This in and of itself was strange to me: teaching in private schools, I've never had a copy limit. I just copy whatever I think I'll need and my judgement's trusted. He asked me what I supposed would be a fair allotment.
This is for nine weeks, with 125 students. As a side note, they don't really have much for textbooks. Never having had a limit to my copies, I recognize that I don't have a good idea of how many copies I actually make, but I decided to start with, say, 3 pages per student per day. I know there are days where I don't copy anything, but there are also days where I photocopy quite a bit more than that, so 3 seemed reasonable to me. 3 pages x 125 students x 9 weeks x 5 days per week = 16,875 (I don't know how I came up with >150,000 when I was talking with him). In any case, I was floored by the number he gave me.
One thousand.
For nine weeks. For 125 students.
That's 8 copies per student per nine weeks. Oh, and he's expected to raise test scores 10%.
In other words, each copy will need to raised scores 1.25%--they're better be damned good handouts, is all I'm saying. What he'll have to do is build handouts like cheatsheets--the way kids write really small to fit more on a sheet, he'll have to make it minuscule. Hmmm... I wonder what his magnifying glass budget is...?