Your colleague’s attitude was the effective mantra for the vast majority of my public magnet HS teachers…except that they were willing to set it to the “top 20%”. Everyone else was expected to keep up or sink.
I was in the very bottom portion of that bottom 80% for most of my HS years.
Interesting. Most seminar classes I’ve had at my LAC were no more than 15 at most. In fact, there was often an official cap at 15 for many of them when I attended. IME, they tend to get unwieldy at around 12+ students…especially if a critical mass fail to do enough of the weekly readings.
In practice, most seminar classes I had averaged around 10-12 with several being 5 or less. .
One seminar I took in modern Chinese history was only me and one other student. It also wasn’t held in a classroom…but instead at a bakery owned by his wife and where he occasionally moonlights as a server in the evenings as part of being a good spouse.
All independent study classes I’ve had(took a few) were just meeting a few times in the Prof’s office…rest was all on me…researching, gathering sources, reading, and writing up the final research paper.
Had a bit of an adjustment to make in grad school as one seminar was 21 students which felt quite unwieldy. Another grad class started at at 13, but 7 ended up not coming back the following week. The heavy weekly reading(peaking at 2000 pages spread out over 6 books) was likely one major factor…especially after one student visibly went pale after reading the course syllabus. The latter grad class ran much more smoothly even with the heavy reading load…which I expected as par for the course.