Tuesday, April 15, 2008
What is really fair?
Although we didn’t get to discuss the book tonight in class, I wanted to touch on the subject of equal treatment of students. In the case of Mrs. Andrews, Tim and Paul, I think that this dilemma happens quite often in classrooms. It is definitely not fair for her to demote Tim into a lower reading level just to deal with a discipline problem in the classroom, nor is it fair for her to do what seems politically correct by putting Paul in the correct reading group just because he is a minority. Mrs. Andrews should find a happy medium for all the students in her classroom. Although the two can sometimes go hand in hand, ultimately discipline and academics are two different subjects and should be treated that way. Students should not be deprived of an education just to keep them from misbehaving. The two boys were on equal reading levels, so they should both be given the opportunity to maximize their potential. I think Mrs. Andrews made a mistake by placing Paul in the higher reading group to keep racial peace as she put it. Obviously, she said that putting the boys in wrong groups was unfair, so why would she do so just to keep peace in the classroom or save face so to speak? Why couldn’t there be two middle level reading groups? Or maybe even try new things for the entire class like rotating the children, possibly pairing strong readers with the lower level readers to help them improve? Why be unfair to one child and give another child the benefit? Discipline is one of the biggest things that worries me, especially picturing that I am going to be a young teacher stepping into a high school classroom-it terrifies me actually-but what extreme does one go to in order to keep problems out of the classroom? I personally think that there are other alternatives that would be a better solution to a problem like Mrs. Andrews', but are teachers taking the easy way out? Are they going the quick fix route no matter whom or what they have to sacrifice?
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4 comments:
From what I have observed it appears in some schools that all the troublesome kids will be pooled into a single class. That way they are not distracting any students who are trying to learn, but then you can imagine how crazy the class is with the students having behavior issues.
This is something that concerned me as I read this chapter. Being unfair just to eliminate a discipline problem is certainly not the correct route to take. Of course, it's easy for me to say that looking at it from the outside. Teaching can be a highly stressful job and some teachers will take the easy way out to try and alleviate the stress, so to speak. It would, in fact, be ideal to find some sort of happy medium where nobody would suffer or be treated unfairly. Can such a situation exist? It depends upon each individual situation and all of the surrounding circumstances, I would think.
I agree with Joeeichel, we all will have to face the reality and see how many of our own ideals are truly effective or useful in the real situations of our classrooms. We will have to see what time in our classrooms teaches us about schools, but we will have to try to keep our ideals but also understand how reality and these ideals will work out.
I don't think there is anything wrong with having ideals. While I was reading, I too was trying to think up solutions to the problem without having to demote anyone. I think teaching is a process of trial and error. The teacher in this case is still working things out. She realizes that her previous attempts to keep them together was not going to work and now the separation is unsuccessful, but she is still in pursuit of a solution. I feel that this is the whole purpose of ideals. They give us goals and keep us from giving up or settling.
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