Philippines – When Irene Mendevil, a high school English teacher, shouts at her students, she said, she gets a sore throat. So she has begun to use an amplifier.

"I had the experience of losing my voice completely," she said of her constant shouting. "No sounds came out of my mouth. I had to write on paper to tell my students what to do."

Mendevil, 33, shouts because her class is so big that just getting the students to listen is a challenge.

There are 100 of them, more or less the same number as in the other classes here in Justice Cecilia Munoz-Palma High School.

And the school itself is not unusual in a country whose population of 92 million is exploding so quickly, and whose education budget is so small that it cannot find space to teach its children.

More children are also coming into the public schools as the economy tightens and families cannot afford the haven of private schools, with their smaller classes.

This school year opened with a nationwide enrollment of 21 million students from elementary through high school, almost exactly 1 million more than in the previous year.

According to the World Bank, the Philippines spends $138 per student per year. By comparison, Thailand spends $853 per student, Singapore spends $1,800, and Japan spends $5,000.

Although the government began a classroom-building program three years ago, the schools are still 27,124 classrooms short of the need, according to Juan Miguel Luz, a former under secretary of education who works with the National Institute for Policy Studies, which advocates for better education policies.

To squeeze in all the students, many classrooms have been divided in two by partitions. Stairwells and corridors have been converted into miniature classrooms. In 2006, double sessions were introduced to relieve some of the pressure.

At Munoz-Palma High School, some lavatories have been converted into claustrophobic faculty lounges, while the lounges have been put to use as classrooms.

"I have 106 students in my class and 90 seats," said Rico Encinares, 34, a chemistry teacher.

"Everybody has seats if some of them are absent. But if they all come, there are not enough seats. They have to share seats."

Only about 10 percent of his students – the truly motivated ones – get a quality education, he said. Individual attention is almost impossible.

"I don’t know the names of all my students, even at the end of the school year," he said. "You only remember the ones who are very noisy or very good. But the silent ones who just sit there listening, you can’t recall their names." (NYT)