By David
Posted June 26, 2009
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Okay, so we all want our children to receive an appropriate amount of attention from their teachers in class. We want the teacher to call on our children an appropriate number of times, and interact with them some of the time.

We want the teacher to identify our children's individual strengths and weaknesses and offer direction that will best serve our child.

But unfortunately, in many classes, not every child is able to receive the appropriate amount of attention, because certain students tend to consume the teacher's time. They do this, most often, with disruptive behavior and leave the teacher with no alternative but to deal with them exclusively for a disproportionate amount of the class time.

In some cases, the child is the class clown, in some cases, a behavioral problem for one reason or another, and in some cases, the disruptive child suffers from ADD and the parents refuse to treat the child medically. The result is the same, though: The teacher is unable to give the rest of the class the attention and quality education that would otherwise be possible.

It seems to me that in a class of 20 students, each student should, on average, receive 5 percent of the teacher's time and attention over the course of a semester. Of course, this may vary for many reasons, but I would use 5 percent as a starting point.

The problem I see in my children's school is that certain children command 10-20 percent of the teacher's time. In some classes, there is more than one such time-consuming child, and the class suffers for it.

Sometimes, parents are told that the teacher's assistant takes care of dealing with disruptive children. In practice, though, it is not always a real solution as the TA eventually tires from the same behavior day in, day out.

One would hope that in expensive private schools, management would intervene and solve the problem in a more decisive manner.