(no subject)
When I was in first grade, my class was paired into three different reading groups. I don't remember exactly how we got together in those groups, maybe it was nap-time for some of us or something, but we sat at table with the rest of the kids in our group and read from a book and then rotated. The orange book was for who they deemed the "average intelligence" kids, the blue book for the "advanced" kids and the brown books for those who "'weren't quite there yet". I was given the orange book, but my friend was given a blue book. I found it very confusing at first why I was stuck with an orange book. I wondered why I wasn't given a blue book. I wanted to be in the same group as my friend, sure, but I didn't understand what made my reading comprehension "average". I knew for a goddamn fact that no one made half as fucking good ninja turtle story books as me or even made stories with their own characters. Of course they weren't basing their assessment on how good a drawing of a cartoon character I could do, but I knew I shouldn't have had an orange book. I looked at my friend's blue book once and didn't see what the big deal was. It was the same stories we had, they just read them faster. I thought this was a huge jip. All I would have had to do was read two paragraphs a week earlier and I could have had that blue book.
And as we moved up the educational latter, by 7th grade all the kids with the blue books were in programs like PACE and deemed "gifted". High school continued this tradition by things such as AP classes. It seems to me that the school system's "assessment" of us in first grade laid the ground-works for the rest of our academic years. By placing us in those little excluded groups, it set the standard by what you were expected of. I'm not complaining I wasn't in an AP class, but why was it only kids with the blue books seemed to take them? I just want to know what they saw in first grade that made them know that this person or that person was smart or not. How did they know I wasn't a genius but really just wanted to play on the jungle gym more, or how did they know I wasn't a complete idiot, but pretended to know what the hell they were talking about?
On a side note, almost everyone in PACE either became a Top-10-in-class on the fast track to success or a burnt out pot-head. Or went and had babies.
And as we moved up the educational latter, by 7th grade all the kids with the blue books were in programs like PACE and deemed "gifted". High school continued this tradition by things such as AP classes. It seems to me that the school system's "assessment" of us in first grade laid the ground-works for the rest of our academic years. By placing us in those little excluded groups, it set the standard by what you were expected of. I'm not complaining I wasn't in an AP class, but why was it only kids with the blue books seemed to take them? I just want to know what they saw in first grade that made them know that this person or that person was smart or not. How did they know I wasn't a genius but really just wanted to play on the jungle gym more, or how did they know I wasn't a complete idiot, but pretended to know what the hell they were talking about?
On a side note, almost everyone in PACE either became a Top-10-in-class on the fast track to success or a burnt out pot-head. Or went and had babies.