After reading the article about Ollie Taylor's Story i started to think about tracking and what i thought about it.

First i thought of my high school and I didn't initially think that we had tracking...but then I remembered that we had general, "normal", and honors classes. I don't really think that the tracks had any negative effects though. Plenty of students in the general classes still went to college, they were only in certain general classes for subjects that they stuggled in, and it helped them to better understand the subject material and get better grades. They were still friends with people in the other classes, and until i just thought about it I didn't really notice the different tracks.

Then i thought about the special ed. school that i work in at home. In most cases they seperate into ability groups for math and reading. They do this by having two combined classrooms for all other subjects, and then the classes mix into two seperate ability groups and one teacher teaches math and the other reading. This way the students have a chance to be together, and I think that most of them don;t even realize that they are being seperated by ability.

In the special ed school students are also all taken out for enrichment. Every student is taken out at soem point in the week. This prevents any students from being made fun of for being taken to special classes because everyone goes. This takes away the stigma and association that being taken out of class means a child is stupid.

So basically what i am trying to get to is that at first i thought that ability grouping was a terrible thing that had only negative effects, but then i realized a lot of situations I have experienced and I don't think it is a bad thing after all. If it is done in the right way I think that it can benefit all students by giving them more opportunities to succeed.

My experience with tracking is usually positive but I have noticed that normally weighted courses stick to traditional (aka arcaine) teaching methods while teachers of honors courses use the newest and most interesting methodolgy. If anything, these methods should be reversed but educational experts claim that honors students are not challenged by traditional instruction. I say: no one is challenged by the traditional, lecture-read-test method, and students lacking intrinsic motivation to learn can be harmed by tracking. At least the honors students have some motivation to learn in a lecture-read-test class, assuming a positive correlation between student performance and student motivation, but normally tracked students -- if a comparison should be made -- need the newest teaching methods to spark interest.

Justin, I agree. Again, I think of my brother's school experience. He was stuck in this cycle in which most of his homework was mindless "busy-work", and so he didn't do it. He would get a low grade, and not be allowed to take honors level classes. I took many honors classes, and always had interesting, thoughtful homework assignments that I'd want to complete. I think that if he had had the same kind of teaching methods, he would have done better in school.