In Tracking: Why School's Need to Take Another Route by Jeannie Oaks, there was a lot that stood out to me; but overall I think grouping children is wrong. In high school you see a lot of this "grouping." There are the kids in CP, honors, and AP. For the most part, these kids stay with the same group of kids throughout high school. These classes are strictly based on academics. There is no room to help each other grow because each one is basically at the same level. I find putting kids of different academic levels in a single classroom is a better idea. This way students can help each other out. Although this may be a little difficult for the teacher, their lessons may be off, but I believe in the long run everything will work out better in the classroom environment.
One place I see this is during my tutoring sessions. I am in an ESL classroom. One thing I find disappointing is that these kids are surrounded with the same 30 kids all throughout school since they are ESL. I find this is more harmful to their learning then helpful. Yes, they are all going through the same struggles of learning English, but they could learn this in a classroom with different kids. Instead they are forced to see the same faces everyday for all four or five years in elementary school.
The last point I want to make comes from Adam's blog. Adam started off with a quote, then gave his opinion. "Finally 'What about average kids? The quality of classes for average students usually falls somewhere between the high and low-class extremes' I feel as though this is really important because being an average kid myself I realized that many of my fellow class mates who were in higher ranking classes were asked to do more and were given more independence, and with kids in lower ranking classes, they were babies their whole way through high school." I found this very interesting because I wasn't really thinking about myself when reading this piece. But I agree with Adam, I would consider myself average as well and those kids who were above me, in the AP courses, had a lot more work, but a lot more elbow room with their learning. Same with the kids in the lower classes. These kids were treated like needed someone to hold their hand through everything. I find both of these situations wrong. Why not mix all of these academic levels together to create equality.
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