Educational Profiling- Individual Paper

As a student that enrolls in some normal courses and have friends from both ESL and regular classes, educational profiling is an important topic to me. I have friends that are considered unintelligent or mediocre because they take regular courses, instead of an AP/honor courses. Furthermore, students are treated in a discriminatory manner by other groups of students and even teachers because of the class that they take. Students that are taking regular classes are considered less intelligent and less capable of learning new things at a faster rate. Thus, they are less likely to be put in complicated courses. Not only do students treating each other differently, teachers and school officials also judge students based on their academic achievements and academic courses. Students that take regular classes are believed to less hardworking and more prone to distractions, as a result, these officials are less likely to put regular students into honors or AP classes. Additionally, some school officials believe most regular students are incapable of succeeding in a harder class. This problem exists today because students are constantly being judged by teachers and, to a greater extent, by other students. Regular students will view AP/honors students as nerds or people who only study, while honors students will view regular students as lazy, therefore, they were unlikely to hang out with them. Many honors students will view regular students as bad role models and people who will grow up to fail in society. Educational profiling can be seen in our school because during a student’s senior year, students who took regular pre-calculus can only be put into a regular calculus or AP Calculus AB class. This means that these pre-calculus students do not get a chance to take AP Calculus BC because they were not in an honors class during their junior year.

Doing a news report on educational profiling is an effective way to address the issue. It informs the audience about the issues that exist in schools. My group used the satirical devices, parody, invective, and farce to mimic the school environment and show that educational profiling does exist in most schools. Our group parodied the typical behaviors of different groups of students to show how others perceive them. Invective is used in the video to display the way students categorize themselves as well as others. And farce is used to exaggerate the way students and treat out students based on the courses that they take. It also adds a comical a tone to keep the audience captivated by the news report. I contributed to the project by taking part in the video. I played the role of the regular student and the ESL student. In one of the scene, I was an ESL student that was insulting an AP student in Chinese. In the video, I was judging the AP student based on the class that he was taking, even though I didn’t know anything else about him. In another scene, I was being interviewed by the visitor and I portrayed the way some AP/ honor students would think of a regular student. Some AP/honor students view regular students as lazy and unsuccessful, so I gave my character a snobby characteristic. Furthermore, I contributed by helping to create the script for the scene. I worked with most of the group to plan out the scenes for the video so that everyone will know their roles by the time we have to record.