Woo-ooo, another educational rant

We've been down this road before.

More than once.

We've reached the time of year when our college has decided to start monitoring closely all of our photocopying and printing. For a change this year they have gone a step further. They have decided to impose a £50 limit. They have, to be fair, said that when we run out we can "request" more but the initial imposition of the limit is because they think we use too much.

Well, let's see, shall we? I teach an Entry 1 class. This, in case anyone doesn't know, is a beginners' class. The range is actually quite wide. At the high end I have a student who can communicate well and works hard at forming good, if rather ungrammatical, sentences. At the low end I have a student who understands almost nothing that is said to her, manages to just about communicate very simple concepts such as "My name is" and can copy things that are written down but very very slowly and without any actual understanding of the words.

The only way to teach such a class is to put very little information on a page and use lots of pictures. I certainly could take out the pictures, use a small typeface and cram a lot onto a page. This would be worse than useless. They do their best and they progress but picking out relevant information from a page that is dense with text is a difficult skill to master. And one they haven't mastered. A little information on a big page, that's the key.

Another suggestion is, print half as many copies and let them share. The trouble is that that's fine during the class but at the end of the lesson half of them go home with nothing to study and nothing to look at. I'll say it again, these are beginners.  They need to be able to consolidate their classwork at home. They CANNOT possibly learn English if they are denied the opportunity to practice.

There is also the question of vocabulary lists. I have to supply them on paper. 

Put them on the board and let them copy it? 

I've heard it suggested. The theory is that we don't need the paper because we can use the board. Well that will work, won't it? If I wrote ten five letter words on the board some students would copy them in a minute, some would take an hour. That's obviously completely impractical.

OK. There are problems but I can still use less paper, can't I?

Let's do some maths shall we?

In my Entry 1 class there are eighteen students. With the best will in the world the smallest amount of paper I can get away with in a lesson is about three pages per student, the average is about five. I teach them three times a week. Photocopies cost 2p each. Prints cost 4p each. Even if we do it all on the copier and nothing on the printer that, when you multiply it out, comes to £5.40.

I have another class in the afternoon. It's a different level with different needs but it still needs a similar amount of paper so that's £10.80 a week.

Of course there is other copying and printing to be done, class lists, group profiles, lesson plans, registers, letters to students, the endless minutiae of college administration. That adds at least another couple of pounds a week. So lets call it about £13 a week.

And I'm part time, add another thirty percent for the full-timers. That £50 isn't going to last long is it? Last term I used about £300. 

I know that we shouldn't waste money but surely we should accept that when students are learning a language - and the college doesn't provide text books for them - we have to give them notes and texts in the form of copies or we are destroying any chance that they have of making a success of the course.

No one has yet suggested that they should buy text books but I'm sure it's only a matter of time and my answer to that will be that some of them live in Government provided single room hostel accommodation and survive on £15 per week provided in the form of supermarket vouchers. They  are not allowed to work and if they work illegally they are liable to deportation. So that would be a non-starter even if it were suggested.

All this for the sake of saving money on copying. Anybody ever heard of "false economy"?