Bakke Case

I found Affirmative Action to be a very interesting subject. I honestly can't ever even remember hearing about it before in this sense. I knew that sometimes there were a designated number of minorities that were hired to make schools/businesses look "good,” but I was totally unaware of this case. It was an eye opener and forced me to really think about the subject, my feelings in this case, and the feelings of discrimination as a whole.

For my own thoughts it reminded me in a sense of the general education classroom. The "gifted" students receive extra services and require extra attention from the teacher so that they are challenged, while on the other end of the spectrum the "special education" kids also receive special services and require extra attention from the teacher to make sure that they are not falling behind in the classroom. Therefore the "average" students that one-day will hold most of the jobs in our country are left with the least attention to their education. Sometimes the "general population" is the one that is actually discriminated against due to special regulations and laws.

In the classroom sense I would use this court case to go with my historical thinking standard. I teach in a low socio-economic school with a high level of minorities. But, I always find it interesting when we talk about civil rights and how involved they get in the discussions. I think that this one might be an interesting discussion that we could have. I would first give them the general background information of this topic so that they knew what we were talking about and then we would open the floor up for discussion with me being the moderator/leader in order to keep control of the discussion. It would be interesting to hear their views on the subject. Then we would take the knowledge and thinking that they had gathered and I would ask them to apply this to something that could affect them today and how they would react. For example I have some very sports oriented students. How would they feel if they didn’t make the team even though they were the better player due to the fact that a certain number of minority or not minority students had to make the team? I think that it would prove to be a very interesting social studies lesson.