Last week on Twitter a teacher lamented over the fact that she had 19 students in her last class of the day and spent "90% of [her] instructional time walking around and redirecting kids to work". I took a screenshot of the tweet and sent it to my department chairs. I was FURIOUS. NINETEEN students? On what planet? Where? How? When I first started teaching, I had five English classes. Four of them were English 12, and I had between 35-39 students per class. This was also the time of class-size reduction for certain grade levels. I had one tenth-grade class of 20. I was lucky to get that because suddenly, every teacher wanted to teach tenth-grade. This year I have three seventh-grade English classes and two of them are over 33. Some of our eighth-grade teachers have 39. Yes, you read that right 39. Thirty-nine hormonal, quirky, energy-filled, needy eighth-graders in one room...with one teacher. Some of our high school English teachers are in the 40s!