Wednesday, December 8, 2010

"Tracking: Why Schools Need to Take Another Route." Quotes



“Tracking: Why Schools Need to Take Another Route”
Finn and Oakes
Quotes

Can separate be equal, and if it can how do we do that?  With that being said, is tracking a positive or negative that is in most schools today?  I feel that it can be both, but I am still not sure to which side I would rally for the most.  Sometimes it is very beneficial to separate students and place them into other classes, while at other times it can be a discouragement to the other students who see their peers going to a higher learning level than they are.

“When I suggest to my hard-bitten students that poor children are not being as well educated as they could be, they are not amused.  They take it as a personal attack from someone who has been living in an ivory tower for the last thirty years and they resent it- a lot”

These children are not amused because they are thinking that it has nothing to do with them, so why should they have to worry about that. Finn is stating here that while he was teaching in a public school setting, he thinks that he went at it the wrong way.  He thought that it should be a more challenging time when students are in school, that way they are always using their critical thinking skills. 

“Tracking leads to substantial differences in the day-to-day learning experiences students have at school.  Moreover, the nature of these differences suggests that students who are placed in high-ability groups have access to far richer schooling experiences than other students.”

Most public schools separate there general education classes because some students are learning at either a higher or lower level than their peers.  I myself was put into the middle (intermediate) classes before I went to college.  I saw myself doing well in those classes, while if I were placed in a higher- level class I know that I would have struggled.  The pace that these lessons were taught at were, much faster than the pace in the inclusion elective classes that we also had to take.  There were far more interruptions during those times.  If a student was placed in the wrong level it would not only set them back, but it would also set back the other students in the class because they would be more interruptions to answer those questions.   

Their capacity for creativity and planning was ignored or denied.  Their response was very much like that of the adults in their community to do work that is mechanical and routine.”

I think that it is disappointing when teachers expect very little out of their students, especially when these students live in an urban/diverse area.  While there are other teachers out there that also don’t care when there above average students are doing well and they then ignore what they are doing because they feel that they have subsequently already received the academic needs that they need.  But, for some reason this continues to happen throughout a lot of school systems throughout the country and they need to be looked at so this does not happen anymore.  

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