Kelleen Toohey’s observation on L2 learners’ education in kindergarten and Grade 1 classroom in Canada reminds me of the schooling days I spent in the rural part of my country. I do believe that schooling days are really memorable in one’s life. The time I had spent with my friends on the way to school and back home are what I still recall very often. Sometimes, I feel perturbed when I happen to remember those days, the days which were full of pain and pleasure for me. Pain in the sense that there was always a throat cutting competition among the student to achieve the first/second position in the classroom and pleasure in the sense that I used to get a big stuff of prize during prize distribution ceremony after getting first rank in my classroom. Reasonably, this ceremony was important mostly for the highest rankers and their parents but for the others it was just a kind of mockery for their equal academic achievement. There were many complaints by the parents regarding the criteria for deciding students’ ranking in the classroom. Most of them were not satisfied with the classroom setting, too.
Interestingly, my classroom setting was also very unique. We used to sit just behind the girls because the first rows were set for them. Even in first row, intelligent and weak girl-students were provided separate seats by their class teacher. The benches and desks at the back were set for the weak boy-students. Class rules were rather strict. Without teacher’s guidance, no one was allowed to change the seats. Benches and desks had created boundaries between the weak and intelligent students. While observing a classroom even through a window outside, one can immediately speculate who were weak and who were bright students in the classroom. This logically illogical positioning of the students in the classroom often had created unexpected ramification. For instance, some of my friends had reluctantly transferred to other schools only because of classroom management.
While reading this article, I remember again the situation in which we were forced to do individual works and possess our own educational materials because we were not supplied any by the school. Students of poor parents were naturally deprived of their educational sources. And, therefore, it seemed that they would feel comfortable to sit at the row behind us so that their teacher would not notice what they were lacking. But practically, the students’ positioning in the classroom had clearly created the social hierarchy among the haves and have-nots. No doubt, encouraging students doing their works individually prepares them to be self-dependent but it sometime generates the situation in which the students may feel frustration and depression when they fail to solve the problem after their constant effort on the same work. For this, group work can be the best way to encourage the students to solve the problem. But in my case, group works were rare in my schooling days.
Obviously, if the teachers fail to concentrate and analyze seriously about the reasons of students’ weak performance, the students’ academic position naturally go down. In this sense, education of the tradition mentioned above is sometime a barrier for strengthening friendship. Teachers’ individual focus, especially on the basis of students’ performance, may create social stratification in the long run. Praising or criticizing the students on the basis of their performance is the sole cause for classroom stratification which ultimately leads to social hierarchization among the people.
I do believe that sometimes academic institutions work as the barriers for students’ solidarity. Students’ ranking through grading is the means of creating social stratification in the future. There are many instances of students’ suicidal cases due to their degrading ranking in the classroom. This means that ranking results not only competitive milieu among the students but also critical situations like the suicidal or oneself-poisoning cases for the teacher educators in the society. Though the awareness of ranking matters little for kindergarten and Grade 1 students, it definitely matters for the higher level students who work genuinely but fail to achieve their desired grade. In order for our own sake to create an academically equal world and to pull down the pillars of social hierarchies and stratifications, let’s work together for the better world tomorrow giving equal grading to all the students in our classroom.
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