I Just Wanna Be Average, By Mike Rose

In many places and schools, there are issues with education and how the system operates. Tracking and ability grouping is the practice of putting students in different classes or groups based on their level of knowledge and their ability to learn. This is an incredibly toxic way to teach students and does more harm than good. In Mike Rose’s essay titled "I Just Wanna Be Average," he addresses many different societal issues and emphasizes the need for solutions. One of the biggest issues has to do with education and schools tracking students' progress from the moment they step into kindergarten. This is wrong because tracking kids from the moment they start school is not always an accurate depiction of their intellectual level. For example,

This would then lead to consequences for their perceptions of their social standing and their peers' social standing in and out of school (Legette). According to Legette, tracking makes students more vulnerable to being seen as different or less valuable. This way of education is awful for students' self-esteem and could lead to students being judgmental because they create their own social perspectives of themselves and their peers. Tracking and ability grouping lead to students feeling insecure in themselves and their academic abilities if they happen to be put in lower-level classes. The insecurity could then have a major impact on how much a student succeeds because they stop trying. For example, in Mike Rose’s essay titled "I Just Wanna Be Average," he explains that as he developed into a more mediocre student, he started to not like English and he got bored of history; he explained that he would stop paying attention to class most of the time and

Some may even agree that there is nothing wrong with tracking students from the moment they start school or putting them into groups based on their intellectual abilities. In an article titled "The pros and cons of academic tracking," one argument that is brought up a lot in support of ability grouping and tracking is that it encourages creative instruction because when teachers are able to use their creativity in order to create unique and different lesson plans for each student, they’re able to increase engagement and performance in their classrooms (Jotform). This is just not fully factual, though, because even though teachers are creating different plans for each group using their creativity, that is one of the biggest issues. That is the whole reason for lower self-esteem and students feeling as if they cannot do as well as other students because they are not getting the same coursework or learning the same material. In general, peer learning, teachers giving weekly reviews, and setting aside days for students to ask questions are better than continuing with tracking and ability grouping in schools for the many reasons talked about