⁹ Now we see the entire arrangement of the room. Boys are on one side and girls on the other, and the floor slopes down toward the teacher's podium, auditorium style. Though Dickens doesn't give us an exact number of students, we can assume there are at least 40, since Sissy is "girl number 20." Often, classrooms employing the Monitorial (also called Lancasterian) educational system which we see here had as many as 100 students, with some of the older students acting as "monitors" who are responsible for teaching the younger students and maintaining discipline. One of the Monitorial system's selling points was its efficiency, allowing one schoolmaster to teach a large number of students. It was education on the factory model, making it perfectly suited to emphasize Dickens' idea of the inhumanity of the factory cities springing up in England.