Sociology and Relations to Personal Experiences Sociology plays a substantial role in every individual’s life. Moreover, sociology is the study of human society and how it functions. It can be found in most if not all social spheres of life. In this paper, the social issues surrounding tracking in educational facilities will be addressed in relation to commonly held beliefs surrounding the practice. Tracking is simply a way of dividing students into different classes by skill or future plans. Carrying on, I will be connecting my personal experiences with this controversial topic. I will do so by explaining how tracking affected my grades while I was in middle and high school and how it influenced my social life. Furthermore, I will connect characteristics of my family structure to my past situations with educational tracking. According to Dalton Conley (2013), in chapter thirteen of his third edition of You May Ask Yourself, tracking is used to …show more content…
Minority and lower-class students are often left behind as a result, receiving inferior instruction and learning less in their classes” (Conley, 2013, p. 507). With this quote in mind, tracking, in my case, completely depended on the educator that was instructing the class, for my parents could not help me with the majority of my schoolwork. My mother, on many occasions, has mentioned that she does not even remember learning most of the things I learned in high school. My father, on top of that, has been out of high school for multiple decades, and purely did not recall certain subjects, for he ended up getting a business-related job, and he was not required to retain aspects of classes I was taking such as pre-calculus and physics. For the most part, I feel that tracking is only beneficial if a student’s personality and other social factors are taken into
Similar to everyone else in the world, many sociological forces have greatly impacted my life and shaped the person that I am today. Throughout Sociology 110, learning what elements in the population’s lives affect the way they live their lives allowed me to consider what has personally affected my own. The person I am today can attribute the sociological forces such my gender, my not-so close knit family, my family’s low socioeconomic status, and sexism in the family. There are plenty of other sociological factors that have considerably rendered my person, however, I believe that the ones I mentioned are the most important factors that manipulated not only how I live my life, but me as a person as well, into my current self.
In today’s society, it is easy to spot someone blaming themselves for the occurrence of their personal life problems. For example, a single-mother may blame herself for not being able to support her children well due to a shortage of money and unavailability to find a decent job. Another could be a newly wed couple having daily arguments that may lead to their divorce, or women who are facing difficulties perceiving their housekeeping responsibilities and wanting to become something more than just a homemaker. These various private tensions may seem very personal. These dilemmas are all related to a bigger world called society and this is known as the sociological imagination. Sociological imagination suggests that people look at their own personal troubles as social issues and, in general try to connect their own individual encounters with the workings of society. The personal problems are closely related to societal issues such as unemployment, marriage, war and even the city life where the private troubles and the public issues become clearly apparent. With the understanding of the sociological imagination, I began to notice the daily choices I make, the classes I attend, the way I was raised by my parents, the group of people I choose to hang out with, the things I like to converse about with others are all somehow affected by public issues and what society tends to make us believe is right. There are many areas in my life where I feel that I am greatly affected by various sociological theories such as events dealing with gender and sexuality, family and culture, ethnicity and race, and social class and work.
The symbolic interactionist perspective is one of the main sociological theories used. It is analyzed on a microlevel and states that how people define a situation becomes the foundation for how they behave. This theory has two parts to it, the significance of interactions between two or more individuals, and the significance of symbols. Symbols are people’s means of distinguishing and defining themselves from other people. A few examples of symbols are hand gestures, money, written languages, and clothes. Symbolic interaction transpires when individuals interact through the utilization of the symbols. An example of symbolic interaction is when people in a neighborhood give the individual(s) that have just moved into that neighborhood food
Kilgore, Sally B. "The Organizational Context of Tracking in Schools." American Sociological Review 56.2 (1991): 189-203. JSTOR. Web. 13 Nov. 2013.
I come from schools where they have no shame on hiding the tracking system from the view of others. The school district calls tracking in two ways, the gifted and talented or on the other hand low achieving. I have been able to be on both sides of the tracking system, when I was a child I was in low achieving classes, and barely learning anything. When I was in my senior year of high school I was in one AP class. At the time I wished that I was seen as smart and talented but in reality would I be happy if I was tracked into the smart classes? Would I have been the person that I turned out to be? I guess I would have not been the hard working person that I came out to be, I would find it hard to get back up when I ever I feel just because I would not know how to deal with the fact that ailing at something or not being good at something is the reason that I never give up so easy. Also because I have a mother that never fell into the views and mentality of human capital, she knew that I could and would make it.
First, studies indicate that tracking has been an immense problem for the achievement gap and it is widely described as an element which has played a huge role in the achievement gap between the white and black population. According to Atkinson (2010), tracking is referred to as a process where students are divided into categories so that they can be put into groups and different types of
Tracking is where students are identified as gifted or placed in remedial classes. By doing this, students learn about their overall success and achievements in comparison to the other groups. In the documentary, the principal, Rob Gasparello, addresses why their school is not the greatest. He states that their school has a “terrible reputation” and that the numbers do not lie. Looking at the data would assume that the overall success rate is not as high as other schools. By knowing this, it can be detrimental to the students’ education. This can be detrimental because students who attend this high school may start believing that they will never be successful so why bother trying. Other students who do not attend this high school may not have respect for these schools and assume they are better because they believe that they go to a better school. This is an example of inequality in education and studies have shown that while education benefits everyone, it does not benefit everyone equally. An inequality in education mirrors and inequality in
Tracking has been a part of an American tradition within the education system for years and its purpose is to separate students into groups according to their academic ability (Datnow 687). Students can be placed into different tracks based on curriculum standards, career goals, and academic ability levels. Students get placed in the same groups based on their past scores, motivation and work ethic (Akos). The point of grouping students together is so students with the same academic ability can work together and be at the same level academically, this is supposed to help the students and the teacher. Academic tracking will be more effective and influence a better learning environment for students to succeed in their education. Tracking can especially help high school students as they are figuring out their paths to college and career goals (Akos). The terms ability grouping, homogeneous grouping, and curriculum grouping all have the same concept of placing students into classrooms based off of their academic ability (Datnow 687). Nearly ninety five percent of schools in America use tracking some way in their school (Akos).
The lower class student’s major issue with learning in class is a shortage of confidence based on real or apparent weakness in the home environment. These students often feel undesirable. They are very aware of the class in which they come from and of the place and position people classify them under, they often feel the urge to hide their background. Students that are categorized in this particular class frequently come to school with a lower level of academic skills and involvedness than their peers that are categorized in the midd...
All students have gone through the tracking system. Some have benefitted greatly, some have failed, and everything in between. The tracking system is not an innately bad idea or system, however when carried out in the way that it is, more students are hamred then helped. Tracking affects every aspect of a child’s success, and when your worlds against you, how can you be expected to succeed?
Social institutions are an important element in the structure of human societies. They provide a structure for behavior in a particular part of social life. The five major social institutions in large societies are family, education, religion, politics, and economics. While each institution does deal with a different aspect of life, they are interrelated and intersect often in the course of daily life. For example, for schools to be able to exist they rely on funding from the government. This is an intersection between politics and education. Social institutions affect individual lives through other aspects of society such as culture, socialization, social stratification, and deviance. This paper will focus on the social institution of education, and how it affects individual lives through socialization, deviance, and social stratification.
Furthermore, the researchers took time to observe children in the program settings to observe possible achievement. Test scores were gathered from the children’s standardized scholastic tests and report cards. The researchers also gathered copies of attendance records, behavior records, and participation in extracurricular activities. Some observations were made during classes to observe the control group students’ progress within classes. The teachers provided the researchers with copies of the student’s tests, quizzes, and other exercises to help determine achievement levels.
One thing I’ve learned this year is that teachers must always strive to adapt to the wide range of individual student abilities, learning styles, and interests even within a single class, but still maintain reasonable expectations, especially if tracking is present in the school. Through my observations, it seems that teacher expectations for students became increasingly lower with each "track." Furthermore, minority, low socioeconomic status and learning support students most frequently appear, in the lower tracks. The low expectations in these classes may be reflected in the students as they leave the school and attempt to function in society. Research by NCTE suggests that ability tracking is detrimental to some groups of students and to many individual students. I will be exploring how low expectations may cause inappropriate behaviors, lack of interest in subject matter, and resistance to learning and how tracking exacerbates these problems.
As mentioned by Peter L. Berger in his book Invitation to Sociology, he argues that there is a debunking motif inherent in sociological consciousness. The very first basic thing about sociology, is that “things are not what they seem” (Berger, 1963, pp. 23). As “the art of mistrust” according to Nietzsche, it can offer us a sociological approach to understanding society as distinct from common sense. Debunking motif, as one of the four kinds of sociological consciousness, is an approach that can be understood as the tool for us to “look behind the scenes” of how society works as social reality has many layers of meaning. Berger referred the debunking motif of sociology as an unmasking tendency and a “seeing through the facades of social structures”
Society is constantly changing, changing in the way people live, work, and behave. Sociology is the way we can study and measure this change by examining social life through basic patterns of social relations in formal organizations, legal institutions, families, economy, and politics. A branch in the study of sociology is the major Sociology of Law, Criminology, and Deviance; this major differs slightly from regular sociology through its electives and focus on the relationship between deviance or differing from the norm, social control, and the criminal justice system. Statistical analysis, survey research, ethnography, conversational analysis, and content analysis are just a few of the research methods used to understand this branch of sociology.