However, the experience that I went through between the period of my high school and community college has totally changed my life. I used to living in Oakland and went school there. When I was a freshman in high school, I did not realize how important education is, plus the pressure that added on me from my parents and the environment that surrounds me, I did not wanted to be serious about school at all. My parents always wanted me to take my time to study and telling me the importance of education, but I believed that people can become successful without education. Therefore, under the ordering of my rebellious heart, I started skipping classes and became lazy about school.
I began to understand that all the name calling and cursing was directed towards me. The saddest realization of this point in my lifetime is I was subconsciously getting used to it. All the excitement I owned about school perished quickly when the teachers would see the way my classmates would treat me, yet they did nothing. After a while, my patience ran out, so I became an introvert and my wardrobe changed from girly to the stereotypical “tom-boy”. I stopped looking for ways to get involved in school because of a bully named Cuevas.
In Elementary School when I was learning how to read and write I experience what felt like the worst days of my childhood. I will never forget those days because I felt worthless and didn’t believe that I would make it through school. My first grade teacher at Fultondale Elementary School started noticing that it was difficult for me to read and write, so she pulled me aside from all the other students to see what I was doing wrong. As this continued I felt more and more like an outcast to my classmates. I remember the teacher calling my parents one day to set up a conference about what strategies they could use at school and home to help me grasp the contents of both reading and writing.
I struggled on my first exam because I was always thinking about what my parents would do if I failed an exam. I did poorly on the first exam and my parents insisted on a parent-teacher conference. I was so embarrassed to see the teacher with my parents. During the conference I felt like a failure for not passing the first exam. My parents kept pushing my teacher to give me some sort of extra credit to help with my grade.
When I enrolled into Math for Elementary Teachers I knew for sure that is was going to be an easy class, but was I wrong. Elementary math has changed a lot since I was in elementary school, which was a complete shock to me. I was taught the procedural way, or as I like to call “lazy way,” and now students are being taught the conceptual way. I never heard of the conceptual way of teaching until taking this course, but I have to say I like this way a lot better than the procedural way. In the beginning I was scared about teaching elementary math because I thought I would never understand math the way students do now.
I asked to be placed in an honors class my junior year; I was told it would be too difficult for me and I would fail. The school also told me that they could not find an open seat in the classrooms for me. This situation is similar to how Douglass felt. As he relates, “It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy” (63). Douglass understands his condition and how he is felt to be inferior and cannot do anything about it, as he is being suppressed.
High school is supposed to be a one more step closer to college; it’s supposed to be preparing you for the future right? Wrong. My experience in high school was very different; I never quite fit in with anyone, the “friends” that I thought that I had used me for money. Let’s just say when I was a freshman I had a friend whom I knew from grade school, her name was Meghan Lawrence and she was the kind of person who I really believed I could tell her anything and she would keep it to herself. Once again I was proven wrong, I developed a crush on a boy and she knew that I had a crush on him; one morning before class both he and she went to the corner store, she thought it would be funny to tell him all about my crush, which he tortured me with, playing with my emotions, made me feel like he might actually like me back.
Because of this, some students cannot succeed in this standardized system. If a student doesn’t learn best with a lecture, then they will not learn as effectively as those that do, causing a lower grade and discouraging the student further from learning. This studen... ... middle of paper ... ...s classes. However, even when I realized what I enjoyed and what I didn’t, I still had to take the classes because they were required, leaving me without the desire to learn in those classes, I was simply there, doing what was necessary to get an “A”. These requirements causing a loss in the actual want to learn is another unintended consequence in our current educational system.
In addition, teachers who have low ability students are not as organized with their lesson plans and they often use different strategies to get their lesson across to their students. A final problem with this type of grouping is that studen... ... middle of paper ... ...rm of ability grouping that we would choose to implement. We feel that it gives the students the chance to exercise their individualistic traits by attempting their full potential when working alongside peers on the same ability scale as they. It also gives the other students in the class (who may be behind) the opportunity to ask questions freely, and not feel unintelligent or hesitant in that they are working alongside students with the same capabilities as themselves. References 1.
If every student is taught to be just as good the next and all taught the exact same things we will never progress as a society. We will be stuck in 2016 forever. Taking the creativity away is also bad for the teachers. Most teachers decided on this job due to their aspiration to help kids achieve their goals and help them grow into good human beings. If they are given things to teach that does not interest them and they have no