After all of our discussions, the one topic that I feel I have learned the most from is poverty. I understand that poverty is not something someone wishes for and when I think of poverty I often think about the part of society in government housing.
In my experience, government housing is where all of the people who are struggling with alcohol and drugs live. They are the part of society that has given up hope and is too lazy to pull themselves off of government help. I don’t associate this group of people with immigrants or hard working people that live at the poverty line, because in my experience those groups of people live differently. In my experience, those groups live in rental homes. Immigrants tend to travel in groups or families and several members of the extended family will rent a home. Each independent family will then share a room. For Americans this would never work, but for people come from countries with smaller homes or apartments an entire house is a lot of room.
Part of my reason for laying the framework of my experience is because I have always felt like the different levels of poverty have different circumstances and values regarding education. Most immigrants believe that education and opportunity is everything and that is why they risked it all for a better life for their family and children. To me this is a sharp contrast to the children whose parents are lost in a world of abuse, drugs, and addiction. I always assumed that they didn’t care about education or helping their child succeed in the world. I assumed that they figured their child’s fate would be similar to theirs.
It never occurred to me until our discussion on poverty that people in poverty were viewed as one class and lumped together with the shared title of "poverty". It also didn’t occur to me that the most common reason that parents were not appearing to support their children was because of intimidation. It seems so clear now as a reasonable assumption, but I really did need to have it pointed out to me. If you left a failed system of education, most of the time with out mastery or a degree, it would be intimidating to send your child into the same structure. The educational format hasn’t changed much, it has just become more difficult. The presence in the school environment has remained similar over the years. If you, as a child were intimidated, just entering the structure of the building would give the same sense of despair. Knowing that your child's success will most likely be independent of your influence because of prior circumstances would create a sense of withdrawal in their educational life.
These talks on poverty have really stirred lots of conversation!
ReplyDeletePoverty is so "hidden" in our country and most of us do know about poverty mainly through sensationalized reports in the media. Some very low income immigrants had a higher standard of living in their home countries but cannot yet work here in their fields, so find themselves facing multiple levels of humiliation and stereotyping. The cab drivers and bus drivers and janitors we meet may well have pasts that we wouldn't expect.
Drug and alcohol abuse rates are high among middle-income and high income parents, too, and they have resources to hide their addictions or to cycle through treatment, and as teachers, it may not occur to us that their children are stressed because of parent addiction.
Most kids in this country who are poor live in rural areas. Poverty is growing fastest in the suburbs where the minimum wage jobs are in retail and other service industries and parents are working full time. Those faces of poverty are the most invisible, but the families are facing so much stress and uncertainty. Food banks in small towns are stretched to the limit now.
But one thing that has changed as you so wisely point out is that schools really haven't been very effective working with kids from poor homes. And we can change that!
This actually dovetails very nicely into the conversation you and I were having last night on using a class web site to provide information access to our students and their parents. This also applies to any technology based assignment, for that matter.
ReplyDeleteWhat do we do when some of our students do not have access to a computer at home? I could definitely see this in issues of poverty especially. Setting aside school time for them to do the work would perhaps solve the problem, but it creates that heiarchy again of the haves (can do the work at home) and the have nots (must scramble to find time at school or library to do the assignment).
I'm searching for the answer of how to include a lot of technology based/ creative assignments which will prepare the kids for the increasingly digital real world, yet not create stress or social complications for some of my potential students.
This turned out to be a pretty long comment. Maybe it will become a blog of my own...
Funny, I was just thinking about the same conversation. The radio was discussing computer access and low income students on my way to school this morning. The position they took was that most game consoles, phones and other hand held devices have access to the internet. The majority of the listeners seem to believe that computer access is not really limited.
ReplyDeleteI'm pondering if part of the development of a classroom community is opening up the doors of the classroom for parents and students to utilize school computers. It might be a really interesting way to see families interact and a great way to gain trust of parents.