Provost, Cathy Davidson, in her narrative essay, “Project Classroom Makeover,” addresses her concern of the hierarchies that have shaped the educational institutions, yet struggles to eliminate hierarchy in education. Davidson’s purpose is to convey the idea that, a part of our failure in the educational institutions is that we use a “one-size-fits-all model.” Davidson has repetitively stated as follows, “we cannot control every outcome or to think that the best way to measure is by keeping each kid on the same page of the same book at the same time,” (61) in fact, not every child has the same skill set and we can no longer put a certain standard and hope that every kid can meet that standard. As Davidson continues her experiments at Duke
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As she continually fails all of her end of the year exams, the girl was “diagnosed with a learning disability, with attention deficit disorder.” (Davidson 62) This is what takes effect when a student could not maintain an acceptable score for the system. The authorities would place her into a category where it would be deemed “acceptable” for her to acquire a poor score. For years in the educational system, they develop programs such as, “English as a Second Language” program, where authorities would often separate students who could comprehend english and those who could not. Often the students in the ESL program would succeed with the extra help, but were still kept away from other english speaking students because the system believed they still “lacked” the skills to be in a classroom. The hierarchies of the educational system continue to limit students to certain skill sets that many of them cannot achieve. The education system must go far beyond what they set the standards to be and that is how we can improve the education system. For example, when Davidson was in intermediate school, it was required to recite a speech in order to graduate but she did not possess the skills for it. Her teacher, “[Miss Schmidt] offered [her] the opportunity to write an essay instead.” (Davidson …show more content…
We now live in a world where we have technological innovations such as smartphones, computers, and the interest while our education system has been the same since the 1950s. The nation’s education system demands that we continue to standardize our classrooms because it will lead to better student achievements but I, however disagree. In order, for the students to succeed, we need to takeover the classrooms and establish a new form of attention, learning, and crowdsourcing. In addition, the education system need to take the student’s objective into consideration as well, by possibly allowing students to write course evaluations and this could benefit the professors. The need for constant public feedback is key in order for the education system to rethink how we measure, test, and create standards for the students. Davidson adopts an informative tone in order to appeal to similar feelings and experiences in her readers as she continues her experiments with the IPods at Duke University and the girl with the striped hair. This indicated that the nation’s educational system has room to improve. The system needs to set goals for this arrangement and ask themselves how they want to teach their students to think critically, how to include different perspectives into their arguments, and how to strengthen their skills and
As she continually fails all of her end of the year exams, the girl was “diagnosed with a learning disability, with attention deficit disorder.” (Davidson 62) This is what takes effect when a student could not maintain an acceptable score for the system. The authorities would place her into a category where it would be deemed “acceptable” for her to acquire a poor score. For years in the educational system, they develop programs such as, “English as a Second Language” program, where authorities would often separate students who could comprehend english and those who could not. Often the students in the ESL program would succeed with the extra help, but were still kept away from other english speaking students because the system believed they still “lacked” the skills to be in a classroom. The hierarchies of the educational system continue to limit students to certain skill sets that many of them cannot achieve. The education system must go far beyond what they set the standards to be and that is how we can improve the education system. For example, when Davidson was in intermediate school, it was required to recite a speech in order to graduate but she did not possess the skills for it. Her teacher, “[Miss Schmidt] offered [her] the opportunity to write an essay instead.” (Davidson …show more content…
We now live in a world where we have technological innovations such as smartphones, computers, and the interest while our education system has been the same since the 1950s. The nation’s education system demands that we continue to standardize our classrooms because it will lead to better student achievements but I, however disagree. In order, for the students to succeed, we need to takeover the classrooms and establish a new form of attention, learning, and crowdsourcing. In addition, the education system need to take the student’s objective into consideration as well, by possibly allowing students to write course evaluations and this could benefit the professors. The need for constant public feedback is key in order for the education system to rethink how we measure, test, and create standards for the students. Davidson adopts an informative tone in order to appeal to similar feelings and experiences in her readers as she continues her experiments with the IPods at Duke University and the girl with the striped hair. This indicated that the nation’s educational system has room to improve. The system needs to set goals for this arrangement and ask themselves how they want to teach their students to think critically, how to include different perspectives into their arguments, and how to strengthen their skills and