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Andrea G.'s picture

Diversity in the classroom

Submitted by Andrea G. on Sun, 02/10/2008 - 10:40pm.

At the end of class on Tuesday, we had started an interesting debate that I'd like to hear other people's opinions on.  There were some arguments against the idea of having "too much" diversity, especially in the classroom, because there was the potential for becoming too homogeneous.  One example given was that teaching all children in the same classroom on the same level would inevitably bring the "smart kids" down to the level at which the material is being taught.  I've had a lot of personal experience with situations like this, and I don't believe that it's true at all.

I came to Bryn Mawr from a fairly large public school system, that, while it prided itself on its high school students' many achievements, never seemed to care at all about improving elementary or middle school educations.  For this reason, it took until ninth grade for our classes to be separated based on achievement level.  Before high school, everyone took essentially all of the same classes, taught on the same level, at an average pace for the majority of students to learn as much as they could. 

Now, there are probably a lot of people who would argue that this is a terrible thing, that kids should be split up so that everyone can learn at more or less their own natural pace.  I certainly wasn't a huge fan of the way our classes were organized - I was bored a lot in class before high school.  That doesn't mean, however, that we're "bringing down" the intellectual level of the students who happen to learn faster.  Sure, it's possible that if my school district had started having honors classes in 6th or 7th grade instead of 9th, they'd have a lot more National Merit Scholars or send more kids to Ivy League schools.  But really, being bored in school and not having to spend a lot of time on my homework every night gave me the opportunity to read, and learn, much more than I would have been able to otherwise.  Groupings in the classroom don't have to impede anyone's education outside of school.  I'm sure we'll discuss topics like this more in class this week, but that's just my two cents on the matter.

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