🚀 go-pugleaf

Lee Blankenship-Brown wrote:

"Davis's point is that heterogeneous grouping forces
teachers to teach only rote skills because that is all that weak
students can handle; therefore, the brighter students are cheated out of
a challenging curriculum."

If heterogeneous grouping forces teachers to teach only rote skills, it is
because the teacher is weak, not the students.

"What's wrong?  THEY DON'T GIVE A
DAMN ABOUT SCHOOL.  THEY ARE WEEDS."

Whoa!  Non-sequitur theater here!  From one sentence to the next, we move
from a description of the student's attitude about school (accurate or not)
to an attribution about their whole person.  I agree with Showers' comment
that Davis' choice of words in his original message ("weeds" vs. "roses") is
disgusting.  Probably the teacher with this weeds/roses mentality going in
(seeing some students as inherently valuable and other as just getting in the
way) is teaching heterogeneous groups in only rote skills because he or she
can't see any other value to the weeds.  So the weeds/roses dichotomy gets
perpetuated.  If you want to develop more "roses" and fewer "weeds," the only
way to begin is to teach _all_ students like "roses."

And no, I'm not one of those "education professionals" so despised in this
thread.

Kevin Fairchild