David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

car. There is simply no way for the cantankerous kids to get away from one another.”
    Here’s another comment from a high school teacher. He had recently had a class of thirty-two and hated it. “When I face a class that large, the first thought that I have is ‘Damn it, every time I collect something to mark, I am going to spend hours of time here at the school when I could be with my own kids.’” But he didn’t want to teach a class of fewer than twenty either:
    The life source of any class is discussion, and that tends to need a certain critical mass to get going. I teach classes right now with students who simply don’t discuss anything, and it is brutal at times. If the numbers get too low, discussion suffers. That seems counterintuitive because I would think that the quiet kids who would hesitate to speak in a class of thirty-two would do so more readily in a class of sixteen. But that hasn’t really been my experience. The quiet ones tend to be quiet regardless. And if the class is too small, among the speakers, you don’t have enough breadth of opinion perhaps to get things really going. There is also something hard to pin down about energy level. A very small group tends to lack the sort of energy that comes from the friction between people.
    And a really, really small class? Beware.
    I had a class of nine students in grade-twelve Academic French. Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? It was a nightmare! You can’t get any kind of conversation or discussion going in the target language. It’s difficult to play games to reinforce vocabulary, grammar skills, et cetera. The momentum just isn’t there.
    The economist Jesse Levin has done some fascinating work along these same lines, looking at Dutch schoolchildren. He counted how many peers children had in their class—that is, students at a similar level of academic ability—and found that the number of peers had a surprising correlation with academic performance, particularly for struggling students. 5 In other words, if you are a student—particularly a poor student—what you need is to have people around you asking the same questions, wrestling with the same issues, and worrying about the same things as you are, so that you feel a little less isolated and a little more normal.
    This is the problem with really small classes, Levin argues. When there are too few students in a room, the chances that children are surrounded by a critical mass of other people like them start to get really low. Taken too far, Levin says, class-size reduction “steals away the peers that struggling students learn from.”
    Can you see why Teresa DeBrito was so worried about Shepaug Valley? She is the principal of a middle school, teaching children at precisely the age when they begin to make the difficult transition to adolescence. They are awkward and self-conscious and anxious about seeming too smart. Getting them to engage, to move beyond simple question-and-answer sessions with their teacher, she said, can be “like pulling teeth.” She wanted lots of interesting and diverse voices in her classrooms, and the kind of excitement that comes from a critical mass of students grappling with the same problem. How do you do that in a half-empty room? “The more students you have,” she continued, “the more variety you can have in those discussions. If it’s too small with kids this age, it’s like they have a muzzle on.” She didn’t say it, but you could imagine her thinking that if someone went and built a massive subdivision on the gently rolling meadow next to the school, she wouldn’t be that unhappy.
    “I started in Meriden as a middle-school math teacher,” DeBrito went on. Meriden is a middle- and lower-income city in another part of the state. “My largest class was twenty-nine kids.” She talked about how hard that was, how much work it took to follow and know and respond to that many students. “You’ve got to be able to have eyes in the back of your head. You’ve got to be able to hear what’s happening when you’re working with a particular group. You have to really be on top of your game when you have that many kids in a classroom so that over there in a corner, they’re not just talking about something that has nothing to do with what they’re supposed to be working on.”
    But then she made a confession. She liked teaching that class. It was one of the best years of her career. The great struggle for someone teaching math to