# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S45
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Fourth Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States. 1884.   45

must be given in English: from this alone it is already clear that the continuation of Division B makes a seventh teacher at the seminary necessary. Or should this division be allowed to lapse? No one will want that who considers that through it we can have, in 5 to 6 years, 30 to 40 more teachers standing in the school service. — But even if this Division B did not exist at all, we would still have to have a seventh teacher. Our combined classes are too large for instruction to be given profitably. — Imagine a teacher who is to give instruction in arithmetic or in Biblical history to a mixed class of 70–80 pupils. What will happen? The arithmetic teacher, at best, calls 10 pupils to the board in one hour and satisfies himself whether they have grasped what was presented in the last hour. Then it moves on to another kind of computation. The second teacher has 10 or 12 pupils, bit by bit, repeat back the Biblical history last presented; then he too moves on in the text. What is the consequence of this? what must the consequence be? That the pupil, with the help of a rule-of-three calculation, comes to the conclusion: if 10 pupils can be taken up in one hour, then, with 2 weekly hours — today being Monday — my turn will not come again until Thursday three weeks hence. And even though he knows that this is an unreliable calculation and that his fate may overtake him sooner: this much is certain to him nonetheless, that the teacher cannot take him up, him alone, too often, because the others must also have their turn. The overcrowding of the classes produces, in a good many pupils, a sense of safety from being called upon, which is a source of laziness; in many others, whom a conscientious disposition keeps from actual laziness, it nevertheless produces a slackening. They want to be called upon too, and more often; they want what they offer the teacher on their mental serving-tray, by raising their hand, to be taken up. It is only a vanishingly small percentage of pupils on whom the overcrowding of the classes exerts no harmful influence. — Also, with classes too large, the teacher gradually loses track of the state of knowledge of the individual pupils, or it is not present to such a degree that he can calmly say to himself: Now I can move on.

"If we now wanted to separate everywhere we still have combined classes today, that is, if we wanted to carry through the five-class system radically, we could not manage at all with only one further teacher. Such an absolute carrying-through, however, is not unconditionally necessary either; in some subjects classes may perfectly well remain combined at times. — But let us assume that, through the division in some subjects of instruction, 12 more teaching hours must be given; this, together with the 12 English hours that Division B will separately require next year,